It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller). I fully back her calls; as the Bill goes into Committee, I am sure we will work across the House to improve some elements it.
I find myself in the unenviable position of being ready to critique quite a bit of the Bill—not necessarily because of what is in it, but because of what is not in it. I say “unenviable” because without doubt the Secretary
of State, who is not currently in his place, and the Minister have open ears for the things being said in this Chamber. The Secretary of State alluded to my contact with him over the weekend; I found him to be incredibly helpful about some difficult cases, specifically around the family court. I suppose I might focus my attention and ire about what is missing on the previous Secretary of State rather than the current one, who has been in post for a couple of weeks and I am not entirely sure has had the time to properly put himself into the Bill. I look forward to seeing that happen as we go through Committee.
We all agree that we do not want victims of crime to be left in terrible situations. We do not want there to be a postcode lottery or people who have suffered crimes not to get justice in this country—I do not doubt that for a second when it comes to the vast majority of people in this House. Unfortunately, however, when politics intervenes I sometimes see a huge amount of headline and very little frontline going on. Some of the things missing from the Bill need to be put into it, to make some of the Prime Minister’s words mean something more than a cracking headline in the Express. We have to work to get that to be the case. I will go over some of the things that should be included to make the Prime Minister good on some of his words.
I very much hope that sexual exploitation is not a wedge issue, but one that we would all focus on getting right. Recently, the Prime Minister talked about there being an element of charge around the duty to report in cases of sexual exploitation. If people fail on their watch as professionals to act collectively to report cases of sexual exploitation or any form of child abuse, they should be subject to a standard that they have to live by. The issue has been consulted on three times in the last 10 years—why on earth is it not in the Bill? The Prime Minister took to various plinths and said that he wanted it to happen. “Crack on!” would be my advice.
Nothing was released on the day the Prime Minister went out to talk about sexual exploitation, following years of many different inquiries from all over the country and amazing work by my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion). Why is none of it reflected in the Bill? Why is there nothing about children living in unregulated accommodation or about powers to change how we deal with the sexual exploitation of British children? I feel that there are huge gaps when it comes to things we have been promised—merely headline, rather than frontline.
The other area that is everybody’s favourite wedge issue —one that the Prime Minister certainly wants to lean on constantly—is the idea of specialist women-only services, which have become the absolute tour de force of a thing that people want to defend. Let me say what is happening across our country because of a commissioning environment created over the last decade. Specialist women-only services have given way to generic services that could offer a lower contract price in local authority areas. Nothing in the Bill says what specialist women’s services are—women do not even get a mention. Nothing in the Bill says what a specialist sexual violence or domestic abuse service is.
I am not talking about a Johnny-come-lately, “We noticed that people care about domestic abuse so we’ll set up a random domestic abuse charity and make it for everybody.” In the last 10 years, the commissioning environment
created in local authorities, and police and crime commissioners, have seen specialist women-only domestic abuse services being told that they absolutely have to see men and will lose their contracts if they do not. Why on earth would we not just commission specialist men’s services if that is what we wanted? We want specialist LGBT services in this space, so why on earth would we not have a strategy to commission them?
What is happening in the broader area that I represent—not my constituency per se—is that contracts are given to generic housing associations or broader victims’ charities. I have a case of a woman who has been taken to eight multi-agency risk assessment conferences; she has been risk-assessed as being at high risk of harm and death eight times. Yet the same agency—apparently a specialist domestic abuse service; one I had never heard of—is also now supporting the perpetrator, who is claiming to be a victim of domestic abuse. It is completely and utterly dangerous to provide that kind of “specialist” service.
If the Prime Minister cared to make more of a headline out of the argument about women-only spaces, the Bill could make it incredibly clear what we mean by specialist women-only domestic and sexual violence services. I implore the Minister to make that happen. There is nothing that says what a specialist agency is. Even the duty to collaborate—honestly, I have heard so many serious case or domestic homicide reviews that say that people did not collaborate! It is not true: people do collaborate, but no one acts. This is about action. People talk to each other all the time. Agencies are constantly passing things on one to another, but people have to actually act and feel empowered to do something with the information.
The Secretary of State, a man I deeply like and respect, said a number of things earlier. The general patter in this place would make it seem that there are independent domestic abuse and independent sexual violence advisers everywhere, as far as the eye can see. That is laughable—in the area where I live, the wait for one at the moment would be at least a year, and they are rationed according to whether someone has come forward to the police. When I did the job, that was absolutely not the case—the victim did not have to be in an active process of police complaint to get access to an ISVA service, but that is exactly what is happening now across our country. The idea that IDAAs and ISVAs are everywhere or that there is anywhere near enough of them is for the birds.
The Secretary of State also said that of course young people should be able to access therapeutic support, to which I say, “Chance would be a fine thing!” I have tried to refer somebody who has been sexually exploited and is suffering from very severe suicide ideation to child and adolescent mental health services, for example. I have then been told that the assessment process will take two and a half years. It is great that the third-party thing that many in the House have campaigned for has come into force. Now let us get some counsellors for people to go to, so that there are some notes to go by. That might be an idea.
Many of us will have seen the letter today from Charlie Webster, a friend of many of us in this Chamber, and the story of her friend Katie who took her life after not being able to overcome the trauma of her situation. That is the reality on the ground.