My Lords, I support the amendments in this group specifically on domestic abuse services. The Justice Committee, in its pre-legislative scrutiny report, observed:
“Additional funding is required to enable services to meet demand and allow the Victims Bill”—
as it then was—
“to live up to its ambitions”.
As the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, pointed out, a mapping exercise by the domestic abuse commissioner revealed just how patchy is the support available to domestic abuse victims and survivors from community-based services because of funding difficulties. Funding, such as it is, is often short-term and insecure, which reduces services’ capacity and ability to plan, with implications for effective service provision and the recruitment and retention of staff.
The mapping exercise also underlined the importance of community-based services, which was what most victims and survivors wanted. This chimes with the experience of organisations such as Refuge and Women’s Aid. The domestic abuse commissioner found that the weaknesses due to funding difficulties were
“compounded for victims and survivors from minoritised communities who face the greatest barriers to support, with specialist ‘by and for’ organisations increasingly defunded despite being best placed to meet their needs”.
In an earlier briefing on the Bill, she pointed out that such organisations
“are particularly ill served by local commissioning, where commissioners can favour fewer larger contracts to cover their whole population, or where there is not the critical mass of individuals from a particular community in a given geographical area for commissioners to commission a bespoke service”.
She emphasises that her mapping exercise shows that by-and-for services are
“by any measure, the most effective services for victims”,—[Official Report, Commons, Victims and Prisoners Bill Committee, 20/06/23; col. 7.]
especially those from minoritised communities.
Women’s Aid makes an important point that the distinction between specialist and generic VAWG services is recognised in Article 2 of the Istanbul convention and should be reflected in the Bill. Women’s Aid also argued that, on the basis of economic analysis conducted for it by ResPublica, the funding of specialist domestic abuse services can be seen as spending to save, given the savings it would generate elsewhere, as the right reverend Prelate underlined.
I return now to a point I raised at Second Reading on the significance of economic abuse. To the Government’s credit, this is now recognised in law. Community-based services need to be able to help victims and survivors of economic abuse, the impact of which can be devastating—even more so given the financial pressures so many families are facing. A Women’s Aid survey last year found that the cost of living crisis has hurt both specialist domestic abuse
services, leaving many on their knees, and of course victims and survivors themselves. Of the women surveyed, 73% told them the charity it had either prevented them leaving or made it harder for them to flee. Some two-thirds said that abusers are now using the increase in the cost of living and concerns about financial hardship as a tool for coercive control, including to justify further restricting their access to money.
This underlines the importance of economic advocacy, both for those who have suffered economic abuse and more generally for domestic abuse victims and survivors. Surviving Economic Abuse has done so much to put the issue on the political map. It has made the case for including economic advocacy in the provision of community-based services, including by-and-for specialist services. It sees this as
“key to victim-survivors’ immediate safety as well as long-term economic independence”.
The charity warns:
“Post-separation economic abuse is the primary reason women return to an abusive partner”.
Economic instability affects the ability to access the criminal justice system and pursue a prosecution. Economic abuse, including post separation, makes rebuilding an independent life extremely challenging. The charity therefore recommends
“that the standard support offer in all domestic abuse services should include economic advocacy in partnership with money, debt, and benefits advice as well as financial services, to help victim-survivors establish … economic safety”.
Existing examples of such support show how it can help victim-survivors establish their economic safety and rebuild their financial independence.
As I have said, economic advocacy is important not just for those subject to economic abuse. The DAC’s mapping exercise found that half of victim-survivors wanting support for domestic abuse during the previous three years mentioned the need for help with money problems or debt. Of those, only 27% were able to get such support, which is almost the largest category of unmet need that the survey found. This suggests that higher priority must be given to funding economic advocacy generally; otherwise, there is a real danger that some victim-survivors will end up returning to an abusive partner because of the dire economic circumstances they face trying to establish an independent life free of abuse.