Domestic Abuse Bill — House of Lords, 2021-01-27
Topic: Law and Crime
Gabrielle Bertin (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, on her speech. She set out the case for the amendments very eloquently. I will speak to Amendments 51 and 54 to which my name is attached. If the horror of losing someone you love is not bad enough, many families, in particular in cases of domestic abuse homicide and suicide, have to put up with the reality that their loved ones may have been saved had earlier interventions been made. This is why I am supporting the amendments put forward by the designate domestic abuse commissioner to establish an oversight mechanism on investigations into domestic abuse related homicides and suicides. She is someone who knows what needs to be done and we should support her with what seem like reasonable and sensible asks The number of women being killed by men has not budged at all over the past decade. Clearly, much more work has to be done to identify the changes needed to prevent future deaths. I believe that Amendments 51 and 54 in particular would be an important step on that journey. An oversight mechanism is absolutely critical. There is a great deal of learning coming from domestic homicide reviews, which were introduced in 2011, and from bereaved families’ selfless contributions, but the lack of oversight and of publication of findings at a national level means that this learning is often being lost or limited to local areas. DHRs, for instance, can be desperately hard to find, buried on community safety partnership websites, which means that wider learning can become next to impossible It is also too often the case that recommendations are not implemented effectively or are implemented in the short term, but actions drift over time. A clear oversight and accountability mechanism, led by the commissioner working with the Home Office, would help to drive effective implementation and share lessons nationally in the long term as well as the short term. As a police officer put it to me this week, one recommendation that is good for one force will probably be good for forces all over the country. The same mistakes will be happening again and again, and that simply cannot carry on when we have a death toll as high as we do Beyond domestic homicide reviews, there is a range of other investigations into the circumstances surrounding an individual’s death which contain recommendations relating to the response of public authorities, as the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, set out. There is currently, however, no systematic way of identifying these investigations for the purpose of ensuring that recommendations are followed up and that key themes across investigations are examined and acted on in order to prevent future deaths. I believe that Amendments 51 and 54 would help address this I will finish by talking briefly about suicide. Mental health has been talked about in previous groupings, and I thought my noble friend the Minister gave some very thorough and thoughtful answers. Sadly, not enough data and shared learning are being collected on suicides as a result of domestic abuse. The correlation is undoubtedly high, but we really do not have a clear picture of the true scale of the problem. One report published by the University of Bristol suggested that nearly 200 victims a year went on to kill themselves on the same day they visited A&E with a domestic abuse related injury. If these figures are accurate, the scale of missed interventions is simply unacceptable. Amendments 51 and 54 would surely complement the endeavour to join up multi-agency thinking and accountability, especially regarding health care providers who we know have such a big role to play. I therefore urge noble Lords to back these amendments.