Domestic Abuse Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 5th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am extremely pleased to be able to be part of this historic debate tonight. It brings back a lot of memories for me from when I was 20 years old and founding Spare Rib magazine. In the second month of our life, we went to visit Erin Pizzey and her newly opened Chiswick Women’s Aid. It was a first in this country and certainly a first for me in learning a bit about domestic abuse. I remember my horror at learning that almost two women a week were killed within the confines of their family. I thought, in my naivety, that women’s liberation and the newly acquired power of women would mean that this figure would reduce. Sadly, it has not, and today the rate is still exactly the same as it was almost 50 years ago.

For this reason and many others, I so welcome the passage of this Bill, and applaud the efforts of so many people who have pulled it all together. When I was a journalist and writing about this, I used to think that if all these women were killed together on one day the whole world would stop and take notice, but somehow this drip feed of pure horror has gone on under our noses. I thank everyone who has made it this far.

I would like to add a very particular and personal note—the question of alcohol in relation to domestic abuse. Twenty-five per cent to 50% of cases of domestic abuse involve alcohol—certainly mostly in the case of the abuser but often in the case of the victim as well. Moving someone to a new location and getting them out of immediate danger is obviously of paramount importance—I cannot stress that enough—but, as they say in certain organisations, just moving does not necessarily remove the problem. If the drinking is not stopped, or at least in some way modified, the victim will go on receiving the abuse.

I have a young cousin who is the superintendent of a police force outside Reading and I spoke to her yesterday about this. She said that out of 50 calls they get every day, over 25 concern domestic abuse, and a huge number of those involve alcohol.

I have been lucky in my life. I have had problems with alcohol but have been able to afford good treatment, including in-house treatment, to help me overcome the situation and to lead a full and happy life. But when I consider the prospect of being on your own with an addiction problem, having coped with a domestic abuse problem, and trying to pull your life back together without sufficient support, I wonder how many women, or indeed men, can do it. So I would like to see added to the Bill provision for sufficient funding and scope for treatment and help for people in this situation, so that they get the support they need. It is only by breaking patterns of dependency that we can stop people re-entering the same kinds of relationships.

My dear little cousin, Felicity—she is not little any more—said that in many cases the police are called to, they see the address, look round the station and say, “Here we go again. It’s probably going to be bad, they’re going to be drunk and she’s going to have a black eye. This is going to go on.”

I would love to meet the Minister to ask whether there is anything that I can do, from my personal experience, to help. It is of great importance that we understand alcohol’s role in these horrible crimes and situations in which both perpetrators and victims are themselves the victims of addiction and troubled lives. They need help to move on.

Domestic Abuse: Protection of Victims

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that question. Coercive control is something that until relatively recently had not been identified as domestic abuse, but it is. Just because something does not involve hitting or physically hurting somebody else does not mean it is not as bad as other types of domestic abuse. I am pleased to be able to tell my noble friend that it remains our intention to publish this to inform the Lords stages of the Domestic Abuse Bill.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, the main way in which child abuse is discovered is either through teachers or social workers, yet throughout most of this year, children have not been in school, and due to social distancing, a lot of social workers have not been able to visit homes. There are also many kids who are still not back at school for all sorts of reasons, and according to various charities I have spoken to, there is a kind of hidden time bomb out there. I know this is very difficult, but I wanted to know whether the Government are aware of this, what they are doing and whether extra resources are being put in to take care of this unbelievably vulnerable small group, which is truly isolated and alone.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right; these children are truly isolated and alone. That has been especially true during lockdown, when we provided funding for the NSPCC. We were aware before lockdown of these children being in a vulnerable position and saw it as one of our priorities, together with domestic violence. One of the reasons, besides lots of others, to get children back to school was for their well-being to be looked after.

Violence Against Women

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I join my noble friend in her horror at how much domestic violence has risen during lockdown. Of course, we may not know the true picture until we come completely out of lockdown. The government hashtag #youarenotalone has had a huge number of views—some 180 million, I think. The things that we have been doing in anticipation of what might happen have, I believe, been the right interventions. On the back of a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, about campaigns, we are currently working with the retail sector and with pharmacies to advertise some of the help that people can get, as well as working on the code word that people might use if they are in trouble.

[Baroness Boycott (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I appreciate how difficult this is to deal with during lockdown. But the two ways that abuse in children is detected—through social workers or by their teachers when they get to school—have both obviously been absent. Campaigners tell me that there has been an enormous rise in violence and abuse against children. What will the Government do as schools come back and lockdown eases to try to catch these extremely vulnerable youngsters in our society?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

We have been very worried about children during this lockdown period, including children who are perhaps witnessing their parents in a domestic violence situation. The noble Baroness will probably know that we gave £1.6 million to the NSPCC so that adults could be aware of some of the things that children might be facing online. There is also the double issue of children witnessing things in the home. Multiagency work is clearly more important now than ever in ensuring that children who may be suffering are brought to the attention of the authorities.

Windrush Compensation Scheme (Expenditure) Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

3rd reading & 2nd reading & Committee negatived & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great delight to follow so many wonderful speeches setting out all the ghastly details of the Windrush affair. In the next few minutes—I assure noble Lords that it will be a few minutes—I want to take a slightly different view. I want to talk about how we came to know about it, how we came to be here today in this Chamber and how this Bill is about to pass. I also want to pay tribute to the power of journalism, when it works. This is a situation that the Government did not want us to know about. They had hidden this truly appalling scandal—something that, as we have heard, affected the lives of totally innocent men and women, not in the past but in our time.

The story, like all good stories, begins with an individual. It began in November 2017, when the Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman was contacted by a charity which was very concerned about one of its clients. A woman called Paulette Wilson had been taken into detention and was threatened with deportation back to Jamaica—a country that she had not set foot in for 50 years. Paulette was 61. She came to Britain at the age of 10 and had lived almost all her life here. She had even worked in this building as a chef in the House of Commons. There was no reason to deport her.

The Guardian published the article and, in the weeks that followed, Amelia Gentleman was contacted by more and more people who were experiencing, as she said, peculiar and very harsh decisions at the hands of the Home Office. Initially, she had thought that Paulette’s case was a one-off, but quite soon she realised that this was systemic. She said at the time that the coalition Government had made a commitment to get migration down to the tens of thousands but were quite unable to do it. Quarter after quarter, the migration figures would come out showing that they were nowhere near their target.

In 2012, the Home Office made a concerted effort, through the Cabinet Office, to introduce policies that would turn Britain into an extremely hostile environment —those were the words of Theresa May—for anyone who was here illegally. It required people to show their passport on many occasions, not just at borders but when they were trying to get housing, jobs or even healthcare.

It soon became clear that the Home Office was not very good at determining who was here legally and who was here illegally. As Amelia Gentleman added, all the people affected by the scandal were here legally. They had arrived in the 1960s and 1970s but just did not have the paperwork. One man in particular concerned her. He had been taken back to Jamaica, as a treat, to celebrate his 50th birthday. It was his first time back since his childhood and, on his return, we did not let him in.

Amelia Gentleman did not give up. Her reports ran in the Guardian every day and were very soon in newspapers across the country. The Government were squirming. They were desperate to deny it and to obfuscate their way out of it. However, the evidence was both overwhelming and, ultimately, unarguable. The fact that we are here today is a testament to the part that journalism played, and, for me, it underwrites the crucial need to maintain a free press in our society. Let us remember that it was journalists, not MPs or Select Committees, who found this story. I know that some parts of my profession peddle fake news and do completely ghastly things but, when they get it right, they sure as hell get it right.

I would like to leave noble Lords with one thought. In China, there is no free press. Without a doubt, the fact that there was no free press allowed the Government to repress the details of what was happening when Covid-19 started to spread through their country. The world was kept in ignorance. If there had been a really serious journalist there and a bunch of brave and determined editors, I wonder whether we might have known about it earlier and whether the outcome might have been different.