My Lords, I am very grateful for the comprehensive opening by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. He and every other noble Lord who has spoken have stressed the urgent need to overhaul and broaden our perpetrator strategy.
Amendment 164 from the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, would correct a very obvious deficiency in the Bill and in our current arrangements for protecting potential victims from known perpetrators who present serious risks to those they may prey on in future, notably women with whom they form new relationships, but sometimes men, when those new partners know little or nothing of their past offending and nothing of the risk they take by being with them.
However, it is not always new partners who may be threatened. Serial stalkers threaten victims they hardly know but who still stand to be harassed by them in life-destroying ways. We know how stalking offences, which may not cause physical harm, can cause long-lasting and sometimes permanent psychological damage. Happy, untroubled lives can easily be reduced to anxious existence only, with work, travel and lives at home overshadowed by ever-present fear.
The case for this amendment is as clear as could be. There can be no argument against including domestic abuse offenders and stalkers in the arrangements already in place under the 2003 Act for serious sexual and violent offenders, including MAPPA. But these arrangements badly need enhancing, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and others have explained, by establishing MAPPA-plus.
A central part of the system is the violent and sex offender register, ViSOR, a national database that enables agencies to register offenders, to carry out risk assessments and keep them up to date, and to manage and keep track of offenders. It is important that the register is national because offenders travel. It has been far too easy in the past for offenders to leave one area and set up home in another, where they are unknown to the police and manage to commit appalling repeat offences, without warning lights ever flashing.
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I have not been able to see any weakness in the way that the amendment is drafted, but it is not the drafting that matters; it is the outcome that we seek. However, there is a further concern, which is that the current arrangements are not working well enough for monitoring offenders who are covered already. None of us can have been unmoved by the harrowing accounts prepared by the tireless campaigner, leading academic on this subject and former police analyst Laura Richards, the founder of Paladin, of horrible violent offences committed by former offenders about which their new partners knew nothing. Those accounts, some given in this debate, catalogue multiple failures of responsible agencies to ensure proper information-sharing and monitoring of offenders’ whereabouts and activities, which have sadly often contributed to tragic results.
Another common theme emerges, and it is really worrying. In so many cases, victims’ complaints to the police have been ignored, not taken seriously, largely disbelieved or simply not followed up. This point is supported by the personal account given by my noble friend Lady Brinton of the long history of her being stalked by a political opponent and then of her many clearly true complaints not being taken seriously. This pattern is not unusual, even in the case of repeated complaints and transparently genuine accounts of violent and abusive attacks.
My noble friend Lord Paddick spoke of the need for a change of culture, not just in the police but in society at large. One of the great benefits of the Bill as a whole will be its effect in fostering that change of culture. However, too little effort has been concentrated on protecting actual and potential victims. When complaints are made, when offenders are released from custody and when they attack victims, there is always a risk of future attacks. The next attack is so often worse than the previous and, tragically, sometimes fatal. As we discussed in the non-fatal strangulation debate, a strangulation offence is a chilling predictor of future homicide.
We need not only MAPPA-plus, and a new category four, but more training for police officers and others involved in taking full histories from vulnerable victims—coaxing out of them full accounts of what has happened, even when those victims are reluctant to give such accounts—and in following up on reported attacks,
recognising risk, protecting victims and monitoring perpetrators. I agree with my noble friend Lord Paddick that this also means a change in education and culture, among children about relationships and in society at large. Effective monitoring would go a long way towards protecting likely victims if the arrangements were made to work well, but there is much more that could be done to protect women and girls from future offences.