Protection of Freedoms Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the Home Secretary and the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) in what is a very interesting debate. Some 10 months ago I set up an all-party committee covering both Houses, including Members from all parties and none, by which I mean it included Cross Benchers from the other place as well. The hon. Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) played a very active part in the committee's deliberations and is to be commended on the hard work that he put in. We looked at the whole issue of a stand-alone offence of stalking, something that I have long believed to be a necessary tool in the criminal justice armoury. We were helped immensely by Laura Richards of Protection Against Stalking and by Harry Fletcher of the National Association of Probation Officers, to whom we as a committee are very grateful. The researcher Delyth Jewell also did a sterling piece of work in clerking the committee. We took evidence from July last year, and we are indebted to those who came and gave of their time to provide evidence to us. I think in particular of the victims and the victims' families. It took a great deal of bravery to relate some of their accounts. Many were harrowing, almost beyond belief and ended, as the Home Secretary said of her constituent, in death. They were awful situations, so we are indebted to those individuals, because they came before the committee and their evidence has convinced us all that this is an urgent matter that needs to be put right. We took evidence from lawyers, who said that there was a lacuna in the current law. I was a Member in 1997 when the Protection from Harassment Act became law, and we thought it a fairly decent piece of legislation. Indeed, by and large it has been and has dealt with a great range of offences, but on the particular offence of stalking in large parts it has not fit the bill. The lawyers told us that they, too, thought we needed to consider a separate offence of stalking. I agree with the Home Secretary that some police officers are very good at pursuing stalking through the provisions in the 1997 Act, but I am afraid—I say this as the brother and the son of police officers; I do not have any great beef with the police generally—that the vast majority cannot handle the problem, hence the fact that 72% to 75% of those surveyed reported that they were very dissatisfied with the police action taken. That is partly to do with complications in the provisions and partly to do with the new form of the offence, which often involves e-transmissions of some kind, and so on. It is also due to a lack of specific training, which is extremely urgent in this context. We took evidence from psychologists who advised us that in many instances it is possible to address such offending behaviour. It is vital, in the case of individuals who would be subject to new section 4A and sent away for a period of incarceration, but also in the case of those subject to new section 2A, who would not be, that criminal psychologists get involved fairly soon in order to divert them from their behaviour, because, by its very nature and essence, stalking is an obsessive, often repeat, offence that goes on and on. We heard examples of individuals in prison who were planning the next stalking venture from their prison cell. I am advised by Laura Richards, in particular, that about 20 to 25 practitioners in the UK are able to diagnose and, in large part, deal with stalking behaviour and divert offenders away from it. That is important, because otherwise all we will do is take them off the streets for a while and then they will be back. Whether they have committed a 2A or a 4A offence, it is vital that we make available the necessary specialist clinical services to deal with them. I am no psychologist and I am not medically qualified, but I know that they often have behavioural, as opposed to psychological, problems. People are trained to help them address that, and their expertise must be used to ensure that we have a proper, tough regime to deal with these awful offenders.