Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendments 43 and 44, to which I have attached my name, and to a part of the group which focuses on the question of domestic violence and the way in which the Bill approaches domestic violence. The history of the justice system and domestic violence is not a very happy one. For many years, crimes within the home were hardly regarded as the business of the state; they were, in the rather grim phrase, ““domestics””—issues to be sorted out as best as they could be between the parties. Of course, the problem was that the parties were very rarely equal. Children, who are often the most damaged victims, are the least equal of all. In all the years that I was a prosecutor, I saw the effects and consequences of that injustice. At its most brutal, I dealt with a startling number of women who had been murdered by their partners, and who had repeatedly been victims of persistent and escalating assault. In too many cases, those assaults had gone completely unpunished and undetected and they were allowed to escalate into killing. It would be difficult to imagine a worse failure of law enforcement policy. When I was the DPP, the prosecution service and the police, notably aided and encouraged by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, when she was a distinguished Attorney-General, spent a great deal of time on this issue, as she knows. We did research, we spoke to victims and to experts, and we educated ourselves, prosecutors and police officers. The most important lesson that we learnt was that the signals sent out by victims of domestic violence can be confused and difficult to read. Sometimes they have to be decoded and understanding that was the key to all the reforms that we undertook. Of course, people in these situations do not send out confusing signals or sometimes behave in ways that are, for us, counterintuitive because they are necessarily lying, but the complex human relationships that are in play do not always allow for a rational train of evidence, so the police and we as prosecutors had to think differently and imaginatively about this category of crime. The Government also have to do that. At the most basic level, a woman who has been beaten up does not always come forward to make an official complaint, but the absence of a complaint is not evidence that a crime has not occurred. The British Crime Survey tells us that up to 25 per cent of women have experienced domestic violence, but the numbers coming forward are far below that: indeed, on the Bar Council's figures from another survey, only 16 per cent of victims of domestic violence come forward. The truth is that an abused woman will not always report her assailant to the police. Often, she will not. If she does, she will not always support a prosecution. Often she will not; often she will return home to face more violence. No doubt sometimes she has children who want their father. Sometimes he is the breadwinner and she fears destitution without him. Sometimes she may simply continue to love him in some way that draws her back. As prosecutors, we learnt not to take the behaviour of victims of domestic abuse at face value. We learnt that we had to get beyond those responses if we were to get the assailant. That was the key: to get beyond the responses. The result was that prosecutions of domestic abusers rose dramatically, as did the rates of conviction. This was painstaking work and it would be a very great shame to see any of it undone. Which of the lessons that we learnt have the drafters of the Bill learnt? The answer is: not enough of them. Frankly, in their understanding of domestic violence, the proposed legal aid reforms could have been written 10 or 15 years ago. It is a matter of great regret that a Bill presented by the coalition Government of which my party is a member appears to step backwards in expecting victims of domestic violence to conform to a stereotype of conduct, so that they will not be believed, their gateway will be shut and they will not get legal aid. This risks condemning many victims of domestic violence to a future with little or no legal succour. It is a policy with which the Government should not be associated. In essence, the Government have done the right thing in Schedule 1 by retaining legal aid in private family law cases where domestic violence is present, but have done the wrong thing by requiring categories of evidence to support the existence of domestic violence that are very commonly absent, such as a criminal conviction, a finding of court and so on. So often, the victims of this sort of conduct seek advice and help from sources other than the authorities.