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Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con): I am delighted to speak in support of the Bill. I hope that it has been worth the wait because, as the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) said, it has been a long time coming. The Bill received its Second Reading in the other place on 15 December last year, and was brought to the Commons from the Lords almost three months ago.

I declare an interest as a patron of the Brighton women's refuge near my constituency in Sussex. I recently visited the Adur district women's refuge in my constituency to see the excellent work that it does in difficult, cramped circumstances on tight budget, and was impressed by the support that it offers many of my constituents. It could offer support to many more, if it had the resources to do so. It operates a floating support housing scheme, and helps people to access services such as GPs, benefits, social and health care, and legal advice. Most important of all, it gives information in a safe and sympathetic environment, as it was lucky enough to be given premises by the local authority and is housed in the Adur civic centre.

Too many such projects and refuges rely on the vagaries of local authority finances and the budgets available in a particular year. Occasionally they receive lottery funding, but they should receive mainstream funding because the number of victims of domestic violence does not fluctuate with the economy, or according to how much council tax or the local authority budget has gone up or down in a given year. We must therefore look again at the way in which many of those essential projects are funded.

As many hon. Members have said, this is not so much about the minutiae and details of the legislation, but about changing cultures and attitudes. It should be commonplace and acceptable to talk about the problem of domestic violence, and we should encourage and coax
 
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out of the shadows people who do not want to admit or acknowledge that they are the victims of domestic violence. It is a very welcome subject and an important Bill, and I am glad that we could support it in another place.

Domestic violence has been a crime in the United Kingdom since 1861, yet two women a week are still killed in England and Wales as a result of domestic violence. Women, as we have heard, are predominantly the victims of domestic violence, which is thought to account for about a quarter of violent crime. It has been estimated that in the past year police attended more than 500,000 million domestic violence calls, which represents a big cost to the police budget. A response to a single incident is estimated to cost more than £1,027. It is important that the police respond and that the scale of that response is not a financial judgment.

The criticism has been made that many domestic violence officers, who do an excellent job—I have met and worked with them in my own constituency—spend a great deal of time seeking information instead of responding to it. Domestic violence does not feature in many Government targets and is not a registered performance indicator, so inevitably it has a lower priority, as is the case with many other things that are subject to the target mentality. Some 62 per cent. of reported domestic violence incidents end in injury, with 18 per cent. requiring medical attention. Those at greatest risk, as we have heard, are women aged 16 to 29. Most alarming of all, as I recently learned, is that domestic violence often starts or escalates when women are pregnant—a time when they need the most support but are also the most vulnerable to potential abusers. Many partners walk out on pregnant women.

A woman is assaulted, on average, 35 times before she flees to safety. She may go to up to 10 different agencies before she gets the help that she needs. It is extremely frustrating for refuges when women are passed around different agencies—a streamlined one-stop-shop approach is needed to provide help at the crucial time when somebody has made the decision to leave home, is on the verge of making such a decision, or desperately needs help to stay in her own home, where she may be under attack. Despite that, however, we have more animal sanctuary places in this country than places in women's refuges. It is estimated that there are 40,000 women staying in refuges, which every year provide accommodation for 23,000 children and 110,000 people in need of refuge support services. We therefore need to treat the problem more seriously.

We have all, I am sure, dealt with constituency cases involving victims of domestic violence. I have dealt with a number in recent months—the problem seems to be on the increase. It is never a straightforward case of a wife being beaten up or physically assaulted by her partner or husband. Usually, the focus is the psychological intimidation that she experiences, even after she has split up with her partner and non-molestation orders have been secured following considerable angst, stress and legal expense. Women can still be abused, and are subject to devious forms of stalking. Former partners may retain house keys, enter premises, rifle through possessions, then disappear. An abuser may move into accommodation close to the home where his former partner lives, hang around the restaurants and schools that she uses or the schools attended by the children.
 
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Such psychological intimidation or stalking can be much more dangerous and threatening than the physical act of being beaten up.

Mr. Dawson: I agree with everything that the hon. Gentleman has said. Is he concerned about the number of contact orders issued to violent fathers with a record of domestic violence, and does he think that we need to take action in the Bill to ensure that contact orders and residence orders are only made when children's safety can be guaranteed?

Tim Loughton: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman who, for once, has not mentioned smacking. He makes a perfectly legitimate point, about which we can have a separate debate, and shall no doubt do so under the auspices of the Children Bill. We need to do a great deal to improve the whole contact process. I am in favour of an assumption of shared parenting contact wherever possible, but clearly where there is a serious risk of harm to the children we need to take suitable precautions to limit, bar or control the contact of non-resident parents at contact centres and so on. The process is extremely complicated—the hon. Gentleman and I agree about much of the problem, and we need to look at ways of solving it.

Many of our constituents who bring cases of domestic violence to our surgeries are frustrated by the lack of effective police action. It is not a case of police officers lacking the will to do something—they are sympathetic to the victim, and many of them, as I have said, do an excellent job—but of it being difficult to pin something on the abusers, who are often devious in the way in which they push the threshold of the law to the limit. Therefore, it is essential that the Bill initiates a joined-up approach among agencies, including the police, the courts, the various health agencies and, because of the stress caused to those involved, housing agencies—one of the most important practical problems for a woman fleeing the home is for her and the children to find alternative accommodation from already strained local authority housing lists—as well as schools and the agencies dealing with alcohol abuse.

I shall concentrate now on the effects on children. There is rather an absence of references to children in the Bill, but they are an important element of the problem we are discussing. Every day, thousands of children witness cruelty and violence behind closed doors. More than a third of children of domestic violence survivors are aware of what is going on. The figure rises to more than half if the woman has suffered repeated violence. There are clear links between domestic violence and child abuse. It may become a generational phenomenon. Hon. Members spoke earlier about a learned attitude, and there is evidence to suggest that if children see parents being physically abused, that behaviour can be replicated in the school playground.

In a recent survey, 27 per cent. of mothers said that violent partners had also physically assaulted their children. That must be psychologically traumatic for children at a sensitive stage of their development. There are implications for the Children Bill, which is currently in another place and will come to this House before long. A significant determining factor for an abused woman leaving an abusive partner is the fear of having
 
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her children taken away from her by social services. We need greater understanding and a better service from social services to reassure an abused woman that her children will be safe if she takes herself to a place of safety where the children can go as well, and that there will not be an assumption that she has somehow become a bad parent and that her children therefore need to be taken into care. That is an important aspect.

There are further implications for the Children Bill arising from the need to share information about domestic violence. I should be interested to hear from the Minister what discussions he has had with the Minister for Children in that regard for the forthcoming Children Bill. I particularly welcome the terms of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill in relation to familial murder—

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