My Lords, Amendment 101 is the first in a group of amendments concerned with ensuring that local authorities can help local victims of domestic abuse and their children, and other victims who flee into the area. I am very grateful to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, for supporting this amendment.
Amendment 101 talks specifically about emergency financial support to victims while Amendments 106 and 107, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Polak, Lord Rosser and Lord Russell, and Amendment 176, in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby, deal with a wider range of provision and co-operation between service providers. I support those amendments, but in the interests of brevity I will leave it to those noble Lords to introduce them.
The point of Amendment 101 is to deal with the issue of women and children particularly who may live or arrive in a local authority area, perhaps just in the clothes that they stand up in. In the Bill the Government recognise the concept of economic abuse, which is a very welcome step. The amendment looks at how to tackle economic abuse when it is used by the perpetrator as an instrument of coercive control—for example, when a woman is deprived of funds so she cannot flee with her children. Local welfare schemes can offer welfare assistance in such emergencies but they vary in extent and quality, from holistic wraparound support systems to underfunded, underused schemes that often get forgotten. Women’s Aid research found that one-third of survivors leaving an abusive partner had to take out credit to do so. Smallwood Trust estimates that 70% of its applications for funds are received from women who are fleeing, or have fled, domestic abuse.
Emergency funding used to be provided by the Department for Work and Pensions in the form of the discretionary social fund, with community care grants often used to help survivors to set up and start again. However, since the responsibility for paying these grants has shifted to hard-pressed local authorities, whose income has been slashed by 60% over the last eight years, and any statutory obligation has ended, the existence of any funding help at all has become a postcode lottery. Since central government devolved the responsibility for payment to local authorities in 2013, the number of people receiving crisis support has plunged by 75%.
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This amendment is supported by the crisis and destitution sector, including the Children’s Society and the Trussell Trust, as well as financial sector experts such as the Lloyds Bank Foundation, the Smallwood Trust, and Surviving Economic Abuse. By enabling this new clause to form part of the Bill, the Government would be holding out a financial lifeline to survivors so that they can afford to escape to safety with their children. I beg to move.