My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I offer the full support of the Green group for this group of amendments collectively. We have already heard very powerful and important testimonies from all who have spoken, but particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, in introducing them and the noble Lord, Lord Woolley of Woodford, in making some powerful points about how BAME communities and other minority communities are affected. I have three or four points to make in general terms. It must be repeated, as all speakers up to now have stressed the importance of specialist support, that simple provision of accommodation will not meet the needs of victims of domestic abuse.
I make a point particularly about funding. As the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, said, competitive tendering for these services has often been—and he used an appropriate word—toxic. I do not think there is anything on this in this amendment, and it may be a matter of policy more than law, but the Government should consider moving away from the idea of regular competition as an appropriate way of seeing that these services are funded. We should move closer towards a system of having a good, ideally local, service that meets the needs of a community, with an appropriate check to see that that continues. The assumption should be that that funding continues, rather than seeing the
huge waste of resources that are put in again and again into bidding to keep contracts. The risk is that you can lose a local service completely, if it loses just one round of contract bidding.
Another point worth making in this context is on the place of refuges in feminist history. From the early 1970s onwards, they were places where we saw the growth and coalescence of a movement. They continue to be a centre for advocacy and campaigning support for the essential services that domestic abuse victims need. If we lose those specialist services, we also lose a lot of that advocacy and campaigning, as well as a depth of knowledge.
I have a final reflection on how we are talking about increasing statutory provision. The Green Party very much believes in localism and decisions made locally, and referred upwards only when absolutely necessary. But we also need a foundation of rights and standards, which is appropriately provided at the national level. Those standards and that statutory provision is not enough; we now that, increasingly, local government is left with barely enough funds to meet its statutory requirements, let alone to provide the extra services and needs that each local community has. When talking about this, it is crucial that we also focus on ensuring that local communities and local government have the funding that they need to meet these statutory requirements—and not just that but to meet the extra, individual local community needs that each local government area has, to ensure that that we truly deliver what the local community asks for.