My Lords, I rise to add my support to those remarks from the right reverend Prelate. I have added my name to Amendment 80, and I wish to say a quick word about the Istanbul convention and about the firewall, which, as we have just heard, is an issue.
If you want to understand why Amendment 80 has been tabled, you need to get out a calendar and track what has happened in the last three years. There have been huge inconsistencies between the Government’s approach and the wording of their priority policies. Initially, they responded to the needs of those with no recourse to public funds—largely, migrants seeking refuge —by saying that they would introduce the support for migrant victims scheme, with two platforms of funding. I will not bore the Committee with the names of those funds, but the Government wished to pilot the scheme. As we have heard, it has now been extended. In fact, the pilot has now been going on longer than if you were to sail around the world in a boat twice over. It has been a hugely long pilot and there has been extensive evaluation of it, so a scheme has clearly been put in place.
However, then the domestic abuse commissioner made a study of the scheme and recommended implementing flexible support for all migrant victims regardless of their status. The Government responded in 2022 by saying that they were not considering a
routine pathway between public services and the domestic abuse sector because they felt the regulations already in place were sufficient. In those regulations that they think sufficient, you find that the support for migrant victims—SMV—scheme they put in place is applicable only to those of certain status seeking refuge or to live in this country. Certain groups are excluded. The Government’s response was basically: “We have what we’ve got. We won’t do anything more”. However, they did not say so in their response to the domestic abuse commissioner; there they simply said that they already could, but you can clearly see from the government regulations that they cannot.
Last year, we had the Illegal Migration Act. A whole host of people—I hope the Minister can tell us how many—who entered this country since it was enacted suddenly have no status, because they are not eligible for anything. We do not even ask them any questions. I do not believe that the Government know nothing about these people. They must know something, but we do not know what it is. We know neither the exact numbers of people who have arrived nor anything about them, because we do not ask them what they are here for. We simply warehouse them before some scheme to remove them from the country—although nowhere near the numbers of people who arrived—takes place. There is a cohort of people who do not have the status currently required for the support for migrant victims scheme. We do not know who they are because the Government do not ask them, but we know that there are substantial numbers of people in that cohort who are suffering or have suffered from domestic abuse.
This is where the problem gets complex. In their evaluation of the Government’s scheme, the London School of Economics and the Oxford Migration Observatory found that the extension of the scheme would produce major cost savings for the Government in the longer term. It estimated that there are potentially 32,000 victims with no recourse to public funds who are likely to report domestic abuse to an authority in each year and that only 7,700 of these victims are likely to access a refuge or accommodation for a short period. It recommended the extension of the model to benefit all the people in that cohort and to do so until their circumstances could be put right.
The government-funded evaluation of the scheme said that it needs to be expanded to include all those without recourse to public funds. There is also a view that more money needs to go into that scheme to provide enough money to give people a route out of the problems they face, which anyone who has contributed to this Bill will know about.
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The second hole the Government have relates to the Istanbul convention. They have this consideration, which they say is an important matter, but it was a temporary consideration while the SMV pilot—going on from 2020 to 2025—was being assessed. The pilot evaluation has already been assessed, but it is still a pilot instead of a fully rolled out scheme. It assessed the impact of providing support to victims but not of providing status. The problem with the Istanbul convention is that, while ratification is welcome, the reservation
the Government have expressed discriminates by restricting the rights of migrant women to a safety currently available to non-migrant women.
Amendment 80 seeks to fill the lacuna we are faced with. If the Government are honest about their recommendation that safety comes first before status then they clearly need to address the lacuna.
I will add a quick word on what is called the firewall—where people’s information and data are not transferred. A domestically abused person might decide to go to the police, and we now know that police routinely pass that information to Home Office immigration officials. So a person goes to the police to try to find a route from domestic abuse and the next thing they know, a Home Office immigration official arrives on their doorstep. If that is not enough to turn people away from going to the police, what is? That is why there is a problem with underreporting: people will not go to the police for fear the Home Office will deport them. They could either be deported by the Home Office or persecuted by their domestic abuser. What sort of choice is that? That is why these amendments are so important.
Finally, we must all agree, as I am sure the Government do, that safety comes before status. In his reply, perhaps the Minister can tell us how many people are affected by the lacuna? How do we know what information we have about them? They are the two things we do not know. If we want safety before status, we must have information. I therefore support the amendments tabled, particularly Amendment 80.