Will this be the Parliament to enact a domestic abuse bill?

When Parliament was dissolved in November the Domestic Abuse Bill fell. The bill had attracted cross-party support and was hailed by campaigners as an historic opportunity to transform support for survivors. There is a consensus that domestic abuse legislation is needed, and all the main parties committed in their manifestos to legislate. Here we examine what the legislation might look like and how far the previous Parliament got with the bill.

What do domestic abuse statistics tell us?

According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, some 7.5% of women and 3.8% of men aged 16 to 74 were estimated to have experienced domestic abuse in 2018-19. This is equivalent to an estimated 1.6 million female and 800,000 male victims. 28% of women and 14% of men aged 16 to 74 had experienced some form of domestic abuse after reaching the age of 16. These figures are equivalent to an estimated 6 million female and 2.9 million male victims.

Since 2016, policies to
address domestic abuse have formed part of an overarching strategy – the Home
Office’s Ending
Violence against Women and Girls strategy 2016-20. The strategy sets out a
framework based on early intervention. This includes locally commissioned services
assessed against a national standard, multi-disciplinary partnership working,
and an improved criminal justice response. It
aims to achieve “a significant reduction” in the number of victims of violence
against women and girls by 2020. As part of this strategy, in the 2017 Queen’s Speech
the May Government committed to introduce domestic abuse legislation.

Draft Domestic Abuse Bill: Content and reaction

The Government consulted
on its legislative proposals in 2018 and produced
a draft Domestic Abuse Bill in January 2019.

The draft bill proposed,
amongst other things, a
new definition of domestic abuse, the creation of a Domestic Abuse
Commissioner, a new system of police-issued domestic abuse protection notices
and court-issued orders, and various changes to court processes, including prohibiting
the accused from cross-examining the complainant.

The proposed legislation
attracted considerable select committee interest. Prior to the bill’s
publication, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee published a report on
domestic abuse, identifying
issues it believed the Government should address in the bill. These
included explicitly recognising the gender inequality underlying domestic abuse
and reflecting this in the definition used in the bill.

The draft bill then underwent
pre-legislative scrutiny by a joint
committee of both Houses, which reported in June 2019. Following that, the chair of the Joint Committee
on Human Rights wrote to the Government to express that committee’s views.

By and large, the committees supported the bill. They nonetheless recommended significant changes, including using a gendered definition of domestic abuse and making the Domestic Abuse Commissioner independent of the Home Office.

The Domestic Abuse Bill 2017-19

The final product of this
extensive consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny was the Domestic Abuse Bill
2017-19, introduced to Parliament in July 2019. While the text of the bill departed
from the draft, largely in response to the committees’ recommendations, it
retained its headline features. It arrived in the House of Commons to a
cross-party consensus that the legislation was needed. MPs and campaigners were
hopeful that, through amendment and debate, the bill would justify its
description as a “once-in-a-generation
opportunity to transform the response to” domestic abuse.

How far did Parliament get with the bill?

Not very. Before it received
its second reading, Parliament was ‘prorogued’ on 10 September and the bill
fell. This is the normal consequence of prorogation: all unfinished bills, not
subject to ‘carry
over motions’, fall. Yet this was not a normal prorogation. The Supreme
Court declared it unlawful and of no effect, which meant the bill had not
fallen. While the bill went on to receive
its second reading on 2 October, and was carried
over prior to the subsequent 8 October prorogation, it made no further
progress before Parliament was dissolved.

A long path to the statute book

If – as indicated in party
manifestos – a domestic abuse bill is to be introduced in the new Parliament,
that bill will have survived consultation, extensive pre-legislative scrutiny,
unlawful prorogation, lawful prorogation and dissolution. While the proceedings
to date have exasperated campaigners, such as
the charity group Women’s Aid, it seems likely that a bill will eventually
reach the statute book. While it is impossible to predict what shape it will
take, there are already calls to amend it from the text introduced in July –
including from the Victims’
Commissioner and the All
Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic Violence and Abuse.

Further reading

• Domestic Abuse Bill 2017-19, House of Commons Library
• The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic Violence and Abuse, All-Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic Violence and Abuse