Stalking Protection Bill (First sitting)

Antoinette Sandbach Excerpts

Committee Debate: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 9th July 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes for introducing this important issue to the House of Commons through her private Member’s Bill, and for all the hard work that she and those who assist her have put into the Bill. It has been a real pleasure to work with her and to see how she has drawn together all the charities that do so much invaluable work in this area, and how she has created cross-party consensus. I was very pleased when I saw the list of Committee members, because everyone present has worked so hard in this area.

I place on record my thanks to Mr and Mrs Ruggles, whom I met through my hon. Friend in our preparations for the Bill, and to Mr and Mrs Gazzard. I met Mr Gazzard when I visited my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester, to whom I am also grateful, and we talked a lot about safeguarding and what more we can do to prevent terrible incidents of this nature. Similarly, I must thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham, who did so much to increase the maximum sentence available when such crimes have been committed.

I reiterate that the Bill has the Government’s wholehearted support and that the question of stalking is of great importance to the Government. The provisions in the Bill will provide the police with a vital additional tool with which to protect victims of stalking and deter perpetrators at the earliest opportunity, but we know that there is much more to do.

I will answer a couple of sensible questions posed by the hon. Member for Rotherham about the consistency of police training and the police response to investigating stalking across the country. The Home Office continues to work with the national police lead, Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills, and will deliver the updated police guidance shortly. That is being overseen by the Home Secretary, who chairs the national oversight group, which I also attend and which does a great deal of work. The hon. Lady also made a valid point about mandatory police training. Clause 12 provides for statutory guidance to the police on stalking and we are committed to working with the College of Policing to deliver refreshed training across public protection portfolios, because we understand that some forces do much better than others, and we need to bring them all up to the same high standard.

We will continue to work closely with criminal justice partners to address the findings of last year’s joint inspectorate report on the police and CPS response to stalking and harassment, including through the national oversight group. In addition, we have provided £4.1 million through the police transformation fund to the police, in partnership with the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which is such an important charity in this area, for a multi-agency stalking interventions programme to share best practice and learning on the development of effective interventions for stalking. The proposed stalking protection orders will form part of this bigger picture to tackle stalking, as a vital additional tool at the disposal of our police forces. I very much pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham about these orders placing positive requirements on the defendant to address their own behaviour to see whether we can break that cycle of stalking.

[Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) (Con)]

In today’s digital world, we see a lot of stalking online and through social media; in fact, the very first contacts with a victim can be via that means. Can the Minister confirm that the orders established by the Bill will cover the digital spaces as well as the real-world space, as it were?

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend, who has done so much to further the cause of women and girls who are the victims of violence, for that intervention. She is absolutely right: the Bill covers the online world as well as the offline world, because we know—sadly—that nowadays obsessive perpetrators will try to reach their victims in any way they can.

However, it is important that we consider protecting women and girls, and indeed men and boys, from all forms of violence, which is why the cross-Government violence against women and girls strategy, published in 2016, sets out our ambition that no victim of abuse should be turned away from the support they need, and we have committed increased funding of £100 million to support that work.