Stalking Protection Bill

Debate between Alex Chalk and Mark Tami

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Friday 23rd November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

As always, the hon. Lady makes her point extremely well—she is absolutely right. When I came into this place in 2015, I really had only the most limited understanding of what stalking was all about but, exactly as the hon. Lady indicates, it has an incredibly insidious effect.

Like so many of us in this place, the circumstances in which I came to understand stalking revolve around a constituency matter. My constituent, Dr Ellie Aston, was a local GP, and someone started to stalk her. What was worrying was the extent to which the behaviour ratcheted up from something that was initially fairly innocuous in terms of attention from a patient to something that became concerning, and then deeply troubling, as the letters multiplied, as he started to attend her home address, as he then started to attend her children’s birthday parties and when there were concerns about the gas supply being interfered with. What is so troubling is that this went on for more than seven years. When the person was arrested, the police looked into his computer and found that he had searched for “How long after a person disappears are they considered dead?” When he was released, he sent a message to the victim saying simply, “Guess who’s back?”

No wonder, then, that many victims of stalking refer to it as murder in slow motion. That might sound like an entirely melodramatic phrase, but they say it because over time their freedom and ability to go about their business starts to be eroded. They are looking over their shoulders and increasingly become prisoners in their own lives. What is so worrying is that stalking can escalate to very serious violence, which underpins why we need to take action early.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Like the hon. Gentleman, I realised the extent of stalking when people brought cases to me. I was particularly struck when it involved an ex-partner and I saw how seriously the police took it. I had a case in which the person moved, and on the day she moved in, she received a card from her ex-partner. The police said, “Well, that’s just quite a nice thing to do.” Actually, it was clearly the ex-partner saying, “I know where you live.”

[Alex Chalk]

That is precisely it. The weight of that experience means that something that might be perceived to be innocuous in isolation becomes a deeply upsetting episode. I shall deal with that in a little more detail in due course.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Chalk]

That is absolutely right. We spend a lot of time in this House passing legislation, and we collectively tend to pat ourselves on the back and say, “Well, look, brilliant, we’ve done it.” But unless legislation can be enforced, it becomes a dead letter. That is conversations that we have in this place in respect of all sorts of things ranging from the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 to the Equality Act 2010 and so on. The concern here is that unless people can get ready access to these sorts of protections then they are, as I say, a dead letter. The point that the hon. Lady makes about injunctions is an extremely good one. How many people want to issue a writ in the county court, or indeed in the High Court, at significant personal cost? Litigation of any type is an uncertain option, and—this is the critical point—what would be the remedy in the event that that injunction is breached? What we need is a swift and muscular—if I may use that expression—approach in order to be able to intervene early. It also has to be fair. That is the point that I will come to after I have taken this one intervention, and then I will make a bit more progress.

[Mark Tami]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, sometimes, the police fail to look at the whole pattern of behaviour and just look at each case in isolation, and it never quite reaches the mark that makes them feel that they need to do something about it?