Domestic Abuse and Hidden Harms during Lockdown

With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to make a statement. The coronavirus pandemic has presented this country with enormous and unprecedented challenges. In order to control the spread of the virus, we have had to ask the public to follow a simple but crucial instruction: stay at home. Earlier this month we entered a new national lockdown, and while we are absolutely clear that these measures are necessary, it is also important to recognise the potential impact on what we refer to as hidden harm crimes, which include domestic abuse, child sexual exploitation and modern slavery. These are some of the most pernicious, harmful types of offending in society, and they often occur behind closed doors. Given that fact, let me reiterate a crucial message that the Prime Minister delivered to the public last week: notwithstanding the restrictions in place, those at risk of abuse can leave home to seek safety and avoid the risk of harm.

Protecting those at risk of abuse and exploitation remains a priority for this Government, which is why I am so pleased that today I can announce the launch of a new codeword scheme for victims of domestic abuse called Ask for ANI. From today, thousands of pharmacies across the UK will provide this service, enabling victims to seek help discreetly. Through a signal to a pharmacist, a victim will be provided with a safe space in the pharmacy, and taken through the support available to them, whether that is a call to the police or a domestic abuse helpline service. The codeword scheme will offer a vital lifeline to all victims, ensuring that they get help in a safe and discreet way.

Let me set out more of the steps that we have taken to ensure that victims and those at risk can continue to access critical advice and support. We have provided unprecedented levels of additional funding to critical frontline services helping victims of domestic abuse. As part of wider charitable funding, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government have between them distributed more than £25 million in emergency covid-19 funding for domestic abuse organisations. That has provided almost 1,900 bed spaces in safe accommodation, and enabled domestic abuse organisations of all sizes to provide advice and support to victims. For example, Home Office funding allowed the charity Safelives to train hundreds of frontline workers online, including new independent domestic violence advisers. To help sustain those charities through the second part of the year, we are providing further funding of nearly £11 million from the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office.

Although funding forms an important strand of our response, it is also vital that victims of domestic abuse, and those worried about them, know how to access help and advice. In April, the Home Secretary launched the #YouAreNotAlone communications campaign to do precisely that. The campaign has reached almost 25 million people through paid advertising, and has been supported by a range of celebrities and influencers who have shared its messages with more than 130 million followers on social media. Materials have been translated into 16 languages. The campaign directs victims to sources of specialist help and support. It also makes clear that the “stay at home” restrictions do not apply to those at risk of abuse who need to leave home to seek help or refuge. We have relaunched the campaign over the winter to reaffirm those messages, and I ask hon. Members across the House to do everything they can to highlight that campaign, and make clear to victims that help continues to be at hand, should they need it.

The police have been, and will continue to be proactive in tackling domestic abuse during this period. Courts have continued to prioritise domestic and child abuse cases throughout, as well as civil protection orders relating to domestic abuse, stalking, forced marriage and female genital mutilation. We have seen many innovative police responses to domestic abuse during the pandemic. The Metropolitan police has developed an online function for the domestic violence disclosure scheme, whereby police can disclose previous domestic violence history to new partners. Nottinghamshire police is applying the disclosure scheme in every domestic abuse occurrence. Other forces are able to use discreet technology to take witness statements remotely, without leaving any trace on the victim’s phone. Some forces, such as Gloucestershire police, have used spare capacity to instigate dedicated domestic violence response vehicles, while independent domestic violence advisers are helping to support victims.

There are, sadly, other forms of hidden harms within domestic abuse, and we are acutely aware that the pandemic has increased risks to some children and young people, and reduced their contact with trusted professionals and adults. The Government are committed to doing everything they can to continue to support and protect children at risk, and they have provided more than £11 million since last June to Barnardo’s See, Hear, Respond service, to support more than 50,000 vulnerable or hidden children, whose usual support networks have been affected by national and local pandemic restrictions.

The Home Office has also launched a national communications campaign, Something’s Not Right, to help children who have been exposed to a range of harms, reaching millions of secondary school children in England. At this time, we are particularly concerned about online harms. With children spending more time on the internet, parents have been signposted to materials for staying safe online, including from the National Crime Agency’s Thinkuknow campaign.

A record number of reports of online child sexual abuse have been processed by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation, including reports of a large increase in self-generated indecent images of children. The Home Office is providing £80,000 to support the development of the IWF’s campaign to support parents in starting conversations with their children around keeping safe online, and to help young people to identify the signs of coercion and to report abuse. In December, we published the full Government response to the consultations on the Online Harms White Paper, which sets out our expectations on companies to keep their users safe, especially children. At the same time, we published the interim code of practice on online child sexual exploitation and abuse, which sets out steps that companies can take now to tackle these crimes on a voluntary basis, ahead of any regulatory system being introduced.

Another form of hidden harm is modern slavery. The Government are committed to the safety and security of victims of modern slavery, particularly during the pandemic, by ensuring that victims are provided with the support they need and that those responsible for these crimes are prosecuted. Last year, we made an additional £1.73 million available for modern slavery services in England and Wales. The funding has enabled providers to adapt the ways in which they provide support during the pandemic, including by reducing face-to-face contact where appropriate and ensuring that support can be accessed remotely. The new Victim Care Contract came into force last week and will help to ensure that victims receive the care they need. In early adopter sites, child victims of modern slavery continue to be supported by the Independent Child Trafficking Guardian scheme which is working flexibly to continue to provide effective and responsive support remotely, both to trafficked children directly and to other professionals. Law enforcement agencies continue to pursue high-risk modern slavery cases where there is a risk of harm or detriment to individuals.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, we have remained resolute in our commitment to tackling abuse that takes place behind closed doors and out of sight. We continue to work across Government to monitor, assess and respond to the ongoing situation, but I ask all hon. Members to consider ways in which they can point victims in their constituencies to support. We will continue to prioritise domestic abuse during and after the pandemic. To do this, we remain committed to delivering our landmark Domestic Abuse Bill to further strengthen protections for victims and bring perpetrators to justice.

In addition, this year we will publish the new Tackling Violence against Women and Girls strategy, which will help us to better target perpetrators and support victims of these abhorrent crimes. We are currently running a call for evidence to inform the new strategy, and I urge hon. Members to share this via their networks within their constituencies to help us reach as wide an audience as possible. This will be followed by a dedicated and complementary domestic abuse strategy that will ensure progress following the passage of the landmark Domestic Abuse Bill. We will soon publish the first-of-its-kind strategy on tackling all forms of child sexual abuse, outlining our long-term ambition to drive a whole-system response in tackling this heinous crime.

In conclusion, I would like to thank everyone involved in helping victims of hidden crimes in this pandemic and beyond, from those working in domestic abuse refuges and community services and in modern slavery safe accommodation, to those scouring the internet to remove images of children being raped, as well as our police officers, our National Crime Agency officers, our Border Force officers and those working in the security services to support this work. I thank them all for what they are doing to help support victims and to stop perpetrators of these terrible crimes. I would like to finish by reassuring all victims of hidden harms that they are not alone, their voices are heard and help will continue to be there for them. I commend this statement to the House.

I thank the Minister for advance sight of her statement. We in the Labour party are really pleased to hear about the launch of the Ask for ANI scheme today, which will be a real innovation in helping victims come forward. Can the Minister tell the House what work her Department has done to ensure that in launching this brilliant scheme, when a victim comes forward there will be support beyond an initial phone call available, especially in cases where victims are not ready to inform the police?

We are now eight days into a third national lockdown, with a “Stay at home” message that we have become incredibly familiar with. It was welcome in this third lockdown that the Prime Minister clarified that individuals who wish to leave their homes to escape domestic abuse could do so. That message was not given back in March, and I welcome that being rectified and that the right thing has now been said.

We on the Opposition Benches welcome what the Minister has said today about the measures being taken to tackle domestic abuse and hidden harms. Back in April, the shadow Home Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) wrote to the Home Secretary urging her to act on this important issue. He also raised concerns from the sector, including the need to bring forward urgently a package of emergency financial support for organisations doing the vital work on the frontline which the Minister has talked about.

It was the Labour party that urged the Government to put in place £75 million of financial support for the sector. When the Government announced that they would do that, we welcomed the support, but the Home Secretary confirmed back in June, months into the crisis, that only a staggering £1.2 million had been spent. Today, the Minister’s statement tells us that 11 months into this crisis, still only a third of that funding has reached the frontline. Can she explain that? Will she tell us when the £51 million unspent will be allocated? Will she confirm that the £11 million extra that she has announced today is in excess of the £75 million already announced?

Order. Before I call the Minister, I must point out that the hon. Lady significantly exceeded the time allocated to her. I know this is a very serious subject, but everybody on the list recognises that, and will want to make points. I must ask for brief questions; if they are not brief, the people who are at the end of the list—everyone can see who they are—will not get to ask their questions. It is a matter of dividing the time in this House equally and fairly between Members.

Thank you for that, Madam Deputy Speaker. Accordingly, I will answer some of the hon. Lady’s questions, and then write to her on the matters that I cannot address, because I am mindful that, as you say, other colleagues would like to come in.

May I deal first with the codeword scheme? I really welcome the fact that the hon. Lady and the Opposition welcome that scheme. It has been carefully thought through, after really careful work with domestic abuse charities, including Hestia, which has done great work with its own safe spaces scheme. We are clear that the scheme must be victim-led. In other words, when a victim is taken into the consultation room in a pharmacy they will be asked by a fully trained pharmacist what they would like to do. For some it may be a 999 call. For others it may well be other forms of help, through the helplines and community services. We will look at the scheme very carefully to ensure that it is working well for victims. It is another source of information and access to help for victims, because we are so aware of how difficult it can be for victims to reach out.

The hon. Lady challenged me on the funding. We have had this conversation before, but the latest figures I have to hand on the funding that we have committed—both the charitable funding that was committed in spring last year and the Home Office’s additional £2 million fund for the helpline services and web-based services—are that a total of just under £27 million has been allocated and, indeed, paid out of Government coffers. That is across the MHCLG, the MOJ and the Home Office. We are working hard to allocate the £11 million, but that was in addition to this funding, which of course is in addition to the funding that is available in normal times.

I am really pleased that, on refuges, part of the funding that has been granted through the Chancellor’s charitable funding that was announced in the spring has allowed just under a further 1,900 spaces in safe accommodation. Clearly, we keep that under review, and want to get to a situation in which the sorts of challenges that the hon. Lady has set out do not apply. That is precisely why we are bringing in the duty on tier 1 local authorities through the Domestic Abuse Bill, and as she will know, MHCLG has already provided funding ahead of the next financial year to help tier 1 local authorities prepare for that.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you and I have both worked on this important policy area in the past, and I commend the Minister on her statement and the added protections she is putting in place. However, evidence is now becoming available that some of the people who are suffering most adversely in this lockdown are adults and children with autism. So that more appropriate and better services can be offered to them to alleviate their suffering, what data are the Government collecting on individuals and families with an autistic member suffering from domestic abuse, and the hidden harms the Minister has referred to, during this lockdown? If the answer is none, can this be remedied immediately? If that data is being collected, can it be published on a regular basis so that specialised support for this vulnerable group of adults and children can be improved?

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise the needs of people living with autism and other such conditions, as she always does when the opportunity presents itself. I hope that she welcomes the mental health reforms that the Government have announced this week, which will be a real step forward in us all understanding the differences between autism and Asperger’s, and the ways in which they are wrongly treated at this point in time under the historic legislation. I also hope that she is aware of the national strategy for disabled people, which the Prime Minister is absolutely committed to publishing. Only yesterday or the day before, in fact, I attended a meeting chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), to work out across Government how we can help people with disabilities, including those who live with autism.

As to the specific points on data, sadly, there is much room for improvement when it comes to the collection of data in respect of victims. I will take away my right hon. Friend’s specific question, because I am very clear in my mind as to how those health conditions can make a person more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, and ensuring that disabled victims of domestic abuse are better looked after will be part of our work. I will draw upon her advice and wisdom in this respect, because we want to be clear that no matter what health conditions and disabilities people are living with, they should not be victims of these terrible crimes.

Abusers exploit lockdowns to increase their control, so I welcome the “Ask for ANI” scheme, which the Home Affairs Committee called for.

On the vital issue of funding for services, can the Minister explain whether the £11 million that she announced is the same £11 million announced for the second lockdown, or is there any additional funding for this difficult third lockdown? The domestic abuse commissioner called for funding to be extended beyond March. Can she tell us whether that is happening?

I thank the right hon. Lady and her Committee for the work that they do to scrutinise, rightly, the work of Government in this regard. I hope that I was clear that the £11 million was the £11 million announced in November, and that was very much directed towards helping organisations for the rest of the financial year.

We are working very closely with domestic abuse services to understand the strains that they are facing. I know from speaking to chief execs of the charities that, like many in frontline services, these frontline workers are just feeling exhausted by having to work in these conditions and with the extra pressures that they have faced over recent months. This money is taking us up to the end of this financial year.

On domestic abuse services beyond the end of this financial year, the right hon. Lady will know that we have just had the spending review process. We are in the middle of working out allocations, but I hope that she draws some comfort, as I said to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) earlier, from the fact that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has already committed £6 million to helping tier 1 local authorities prepare for that really important duty, set out in the Bill, to help victims in safe accommodation.

I know that my hon. Friend is aware that lockdown has been so challenging for new families with small babies; in certain tragic cases, it has been deadly to those babies and toddlers. The early years healthy development review that I am chairing on behalf of the Government has heard about the effect that lockdown has had on our very youngest. What steps is she taking to protect the youngest in our society from the effects of domestic violence?

I thank my right hon. Friend for the amazing work that she is doing in this regard. It has long been a passion of hers, and I look forward to her drawing her conclusions in due course on this vital piece of work.

We are very conscious of the pressures on children in abusive households, including on pre-school children, which is why we have provided £3 million to support children affected by domestic abuse and, indeed, corresponding work on the development of perpetrator programmes. None the less, we are very aware of the need, as she says, sadly, to look after the youngest babies and children because of some of the figures that came out of the last full lockdown. This is why her work and our work to continue to tackle these terrible crimes is so vital, not least because seeing this abuse at a young age can have terrible effects on the children’s long-term life chances as well.

Between April and November last year, referrals from the NSPCC to police and social services about child abuse increased by 79%. Schools play an important role in identifying potential abuse, so with the current lockdown, this is likely to be harder to pick up on. With local authorities already facing considerable financial pressures, what extra resources will the Government be giving them to help detect and prevent child abuse during this lockdown?

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to highlight the enormous work that schools are doing during lockdown restrictions as well as in the period that we had last year between lockdown restrictions. We have invested some £8 million to help teachers spot some of the signs of abuse and distress in children. It may take some time for those signs to show when children return to the classroom, but the money is intended to help to address that. The hon. Lady will, I hope, have heard about the investment we have made in the “See, Hear, Respond” scheme. We have also provided £7.6 million to children’s charities that have suffered financial hardship due to covid-19.

We continue to fund Childline, as well as the professional helpline for adults who are concerned about a child. In addition, we are funding a helpline set up by Operation Encompass in the middle of the first national lockdown last year. It is a helpline for teachers worried about the families of children in their school, particularly in relation to domestic abuse, and want to know what they can do to help. The Operation Encompass helpline exists very much to help the teachers who help to look after our children, and I recommend it to teachers in the hon. Lady’s constituency and elsewhere.

I warmly welcome the launch of the new codeword scheme today. I have a constituent whose abusive partner is the subject of a non-molestation order, but because the place where she lives is the place where they had a joint business, he has managed to get the zonal aspect of the order lifted, on the ground that he needs to be in the location for business. The abuse has restarted, and during lockdown it is difficult for my constituent’s friends and family to support her in the right way. Will my hon. Friend meet me to discuss how to give better support to victims of abuse in these circumstances?

I most certainly will meet my hon. Friend, and I thank him for raising a case that demonstrates the complexity of many people’s experiences of abuse, even after a relationship has ended. The Bill contains a number of measures to address that sort of abusive behaviour, including the introduction of domestic abuse protection orders that will put positive requirements on offenders, as well as negative ones. I am happy to meet him, and I hope that, through his work and support from services, his constituent is able to find a solution to the terrible situation he has described.

There is a lot to commend in the statement, in particular the “Ask for ANI” scheme, but I put it to the Minister that what is really important is early detection of abuse and abusive behaviour, because that is most likely to lead to behaviour change on the part of the perpetrator. That is why it is so important, particularly during lockdown, that victims are at least given credibility and that early action is taken to support them and to work with perpetrators to break the cycle. That is vital during covid, as it is in normal times.

I agree. May I say that it is a pleasure to see the hon. Gentleman again? He is absolutely right to say that this is not just about supporting victims; we want to deal with perpetrators’ behaviour as well and to stop the cycle of abuse. That is why in addition to all the work we are doing during the pandemic this year, we are investing £7.1 million in perpetrator programmes. We want to tackle that offending behaviour.

I want to highlight the existence of a helpline, the “Respect” helpline, which can help people worried about the way they are beginning to behave. The number is on the gov.uk website. Sadly, it has seen an increase in calls during the pandemic, but it offers help for people who are worried about their own behaviour—to stop a situation from spiralling, as the hon. Gentleman describes so eloquently.