Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

As ever, it is difficult to disagree with even a scintilla of what my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) has said. As in Committee, we have had a constructive debate on this subject, and especially so on this occasion as so many contributors on both sides of the House with experience of dealing with domestic violence issues have spoken. I am perfectly happy to concede that my experience and understanding of the issue under discussion is very limited, but ever since becoming a Member of Parliament in 2010, shocking case after shocking case has been laid before me in my surgery, and I have seen the work done by the various institutions in my constituency that deal with domestic violence. I was not a specialist in this area before, nor would I be able to lecture some on the Opposition Benches on it, so the intervention by the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) was particularly important in saying that we had come a long distance on how the police and agencies deal with domestic violence, and it is important that we do nothing to retard that. With that in mind, I find it surprising that the tone of some contributions would suggest that on this issue there was division along political lines—one Bench against another. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), who cannot be here today because she is in hospital, has campaigned against domestic violence, especially violence against women, for many years. My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) has not only sat on the bench recently dealing with cases where domestic violence had been an issue in the criminal court, but prosecuted and defended on that matter. It therefore behoves hon. Members, particularly some on the Opposition Front Bench, not to shout and hurl insults at Conservative Members who wish to give a detailed and reasoned explanation of their views, and not to suggest that there is political division between us on the matter of domestic violence. I remind Labour Members that the Government are going to produce a comprehensive strategy on tackling domestic violence shortly. I look forward to seeing it and I hope that it will draw together the various threads that we have heard about in today's debate. That needs to happen because one part of government does not speak to another, just as parts of local government and the local police force do not speak to one another, as all of us will have found locally time and again. One example will suffice in that regard. It concerns the most horrendous attack on a constituent whose husband had been released from prison on licence. Even though there was a multi-agency public protection arrangement—MAPPA—protocol set up around this gentleman, the attack was revealed only because of a revelation made by the six-year-old child of my constituent in their primary school. The school had never been involved in the MAPPA discussions about this offender, even though, had it been, the abuse would have been identified some weeks beforehand. I hope in highlighting this to say that the impression that we can solve the problem of domestic violence via legal aid and the courts —I know that this was not all Members, but the impression was given—is fundamentally misconceived. We will deal with this problem—this will be a very long haul—only if we take a cross-governmental approach, and not one led by what happens when things get to court, let alone when they get half way through. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) correctly said that women who report to the police have typically had 20 incidents of assault prior to that moment. We need to deal with things before then. The suggestion that we must be able to solve all this in the definition of the domestic violence protocols within this legislation—