Baroness Brinton
Main Page: Baroness Brinton (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Baroness Manzoor
The new police civil orders will be very important in relation to stalking. As the noble Baroness will know, the police transformation fund is a police-led process, so it is the responsibility of police forces themselves to decide how to evaluate their own projects. The Home Office provides assurance through the grant agreement process to ensure that a rigorous assessment of PTF projects is conducted quarterly and a final evaluation is provided on completion of any project that has been funded. This ensures that wider learning is captured and can be shared across the country by both police forces and the department.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
In 2000 Tony Blair proposed that stalkers should have electronic tagging, but 18 years on we are still waiting. There are many victims of stalking, including Tracey Morgan, who suffered over a decade of being harassed and stalked by her former partner, and said:
“When he is released, my sentence starts”.
The key thing about the proposed new tags is that they give proximity alerts to victims, which is an important reassurance. Can the Minister assure us that the results of the consultation will happen speedily, and that the scheme will be introduced to give reassurance to victims of stalking across the country?
Baroness Manzoor
I agree with the noble Baroness that stalking can have terrifying consequences for the victim—certainly if the perpetrator has been convicted. Part of electronic monitoring is a rollout programme that will happen as a result of the transformation fund that I just mentioned. How this is taken forward will be up to police forces, but I agree that electronic surveillance, both for the perpetrator and the victim, if it is done on a voluntary basis, is perhaps the way forward.