The amendment is not dissimilar to new clause 26, so I shall speak to them together, before moving on to new clause 27.

This part of the Bill is specifically about further provisions, beyond those that the Minister has just outlined for us—about where people can and cannot go. This is about positive actions that can be taken in the court. Of course, that is not new to the Bill. This is a new Bill, and a new clause in it, but for many years the court has had the option to make positive requirements in such cases as those we are discussing and many others, so it is no surprise to see this in the Bill.

The new Bill establishes domestic abuse prevention orders that enable judges to require perpetrators to attend behaviour change interventions as part of their sentence. Again, they exist already. It is estimated that a need for 15,200 extra places on behaviour change and drug or alcohol programmes could spring out of the possible requirement to take positive action. I do not stand in criticism—I am looking forward to 15,200 extra people going through behaviour change courses—but there are currently no proposals to ensure that such interventions meet any sort of minimum standard.

I feel as though my hon. Friend the Member for Hove and I have been constantly asking the Minister about how we will review things and how we will know how they are going. Currently, there is no minimum standard for positive actions ordered by the court. At worst, poorly run programmes can increase the risk to victims. I know the Government would not want to put themselves in a position where a programme that they have funded would ever harm a victim. At best, a poor programme is a waste of money. We can all agree that there is no room for waste in the field of domestic abuse, with services up and down the country already strapped for cash. With the necessary quality assurance amendments, however, the Bill could mark a new era in which perpetrators are held to account and given genuine chances to change.

In a sort of change theory moment, the fact that I just stood in the House of Commons and said my last sentence proves that people can change, because I did not have any time and/or respect for behaviour change programmes when I worked in domestic abuse services, largely because of some of the experiences that I am referring to and the need for such programmes to be quality assured. I saw waste, and what I saw very rarely ended up being rooted in the safety of the victim. Provision is at best patchy; there have been years of problems with evidence-based programmes for perpetrators, and it seems patchy even in areas that one might think would be compelled to deliver them, such as probation.

I have seen instances of one local authority in the area where I worked putting out a tender for perpetrator programmes. It was quite a generous tender at the time—we are talking about seven years ago—because there was not much money going around. It was around £100,000 for a small local authority area—not Birmingham, because we would need millions—to offer services to around 100 perpetrators and to set up a programme to do that. During the tendering process, I saw the amount of the money that was to go to the specialist sector. The commissioners recognise—better than in most areas—that we should not be commissioning perpetrator services without the relative support being provided to victims. That has definitely happened, because, as we heard yesterday, good people and good local authorities working in the borough spoke up and said, “Hang on a minute. You can’t commission these services for perpetrators if you don’t also put in place support for the victims.”

I see the Minister nodding. It is now long agreed that that is the right way to handle this issue. However, just as an aside on what I would call patriarchal commissioning, there was £100,000 to deal with the perpetrators on the programme, and £18,000 to deal with the victims and their children. There is a balance between how much we value each thing in the system. I saw more than an unfair commissioning round, which I have been part of millions of times. Many providers who never had expertise in work with victims or perpetrators of domestic abuse saw on the council website that there was £100,000 being offered to people who could work with perpetrators, and, say, the local housing association would suddenly say “We know loads about perpetrators. We will set up a perpetrator programme.” Seven years ago when everything was being cut we used to say “diversify or die”, so if there was £100,000 they would say “We will do that.” Smaller organisations would say “We can go on Google and write a perpetrator programme.” I kid you not. That is the kind of thing that would go on.

The commissioners in our local authorities, with the best will in the world, who were in this instance doing lots of things right, were not experts in what a good quality-assured perpetrator programme might be—not at all. In the commissioning round we were commissioned, as the only violence against women and girls organisation in the area, to do the victim support work. A host of different people suddenly wanted a chat with us, to get our expertise in the commissioning round. Commissioning can make someone very popular. Never has my organisation been more popular than when probation was privatised. Every company from all over the country wanted a chat about our expert services.

A wide variety of agencies said they could handle perpetrators. In that instance the right thing happened—and fair play to the commissioners. The contract went to probation in the end, and before it could be realised probation withdrew on the grounds that it could not deliver the programme safely on behalf of the victims, because of the contract arrangements. In the end the programme did not happen. I point that out only because in that local authority area there were organisations such as the one I worked for, which punched well above its weight in lobbying and working with local authorities in the area. Also there was a decent head of what was then the community interest company in probation services, who did the right thing. However, anyone else who had been given the contract would probably just have delivered it along lines. It would have been monitored by a local authority provider commissioner with no idea about change management with offenders. With the greatest respect to local authorities, what do their commissioners know about that?

I used to go and speak to all the judges about female offenders and say, “Send them on our programmes.” I foresee a situation in which a judge, rightly looking around, thinks, “I’ve got this leaflet; I can do a positive thing. I am going to send this person”—and we have no idea, and the court has no understanding, whether where the person is being sent is any good. There is nothing in the Bill to provide quality assurance of those positive requirements.

Quality assurance provisions would be written into law only to apply to the DAPOs, but the expectation is that they would set a benchmark for all behaviour interventions commissioned by public bodies, raising, for example, the standard of work in probation. The probation service that I mentioned withdrew from the work in question out of morality and good sense, but a report from Her Majesty’s inspectorate of probation on the provision of domestic abuse rehabilitation activities demonstrates how urgently that is needed:

“Some responsible officers were delivering the domestic abuse RAR”— the rehabilitation activity requirement—

“on a one-to-one basis, borrowing resources from colleagues, browsing the internet for resources or devising their own one-to-one interventions. There was no system in place to make sure that interventions were evidence-based and delivered safely and effectively”.

Perhaps my seven-years-ago story speaks to what was found in that probation report. The Minister spoke earlier about something else that had progressed over five years. I think that in the area I have been discussing, we have progressed vastly. The reason why I say that is that my opinion of perpetrator programmes has followed the evidence—I can change, proving that change is possible. I followed the science, as the Government like to say at the moment. The evidence base is now strong where previously it was not, so it presents an opportunity.

I will never forget watching a video of a perpetrator group about 10 years ago as part of a training exercise. In the video, there was a group of perpetrators, which, when a group activity is done, has a “rogues gallery” element. I remember one man saying that he had been violent toward his wife because she had not made his cup of tea the way that he liked it. Somebody else in the group said, “Maybe the best thing you can do is to tell her more explicitly or write down exactly how you like it.” I remember being in that training exercise and wanting to say, “Make it yourself!”—as the Minister pre-empted—“Tell him she is not his slave.”

Since that wild west, through the work of some incredibly brilliant people, we have the idea of rooting out those paternalistic norms that we no longer recognise in marriages or partnerships in our society, and challenging the patriarchal norms, such as the idea that somebody is there to serve another for their pleasure, or for them to control. We are addressing those norms from the point of view of the victim and we have come a long way. I would like to think that that would never again be said in such a group and that someone might say, “Make your own sodding tea!” Excuse my unparliamentary language—I apologise.

Respect, a brilliant organisation working in the field, currently has a gold standard for quality perpetrator programmes. That standard has already been endorsed by the Government, whose new published standards could and should draw heavily from it. Those new standards will need to be developed in consultation with specialist domestic abuse sector organisations and the devolved Government in Wales. At their core, those standards will require a focus on the safety and wellbeing of the victim, so that every step taken with the perpetrator is taken with thought given to its impact on the victim. Assuring quality will be an important step forward. However, it will have to be combined with both a significant investment so that a range of interventions are available and skilled assessments, on a case-by-case basis, regarding the suitability of any given intervention for a specific perpetrator.

When we have pushed back against something and asked the Minister, “What about in this case?” or “What about in that locality?”, the Minister has pushed back with the reality that cases must be heard on their own merit and that situations always rise and fall on their own merit. The same would apply in this instance. I could easily be accused of wanting the moon on a stick, so how would it work in practice? Well, most importantly, the Government would consult the domestic abuse sector—including leading organisations such as Respect, as well as survivors—and publish standards. There are various options for accrediting programmes and ensuring that the standard is met in practice as well as on paper.