Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

114D: After Clause 55, insert the following new Clause—
“Training on stalking
The Secretary of State must seek to ensure that every professional in the criminal justice system, including staff of the Crown Prosecution Service, probation officers, police officers, and other relevant public officials involved in any investigation or legal proceedings involving stalking, has attended and completed relevant specialist training.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment aims to promote the early identification of stalking, and better investigation and prosecution of the crime, by requiring the Government to implement the adoption of specialised stalking training for relevant public officials which is currently not mandated.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I start by thanking several noble Baronesses who, for many years, have been trying to persuade Her Majesty’s Government to address stalking and understand it rather better than we have done hitherto. In no particular order, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Royall, Lady Brinton—who we will be hearing from in a minute—and Lady Newlove, and pay tribute to them for their persistence.

This is a simple and brief amendment, designed to ensure that the many agencies and individuals that encounter different forms of stalking know better what it is they are dealing with. There are two key messages that we need to take on board. The first is that stalking is carried out in England and Wales on an industrial scale. There were 1.5 million victims of stalking in 2019-20 in England and Wales. Only 0.1% of those instances resulted in a conviction. Around 77% of that 1.5 million experienced an average of over 100 stalking incidents before they actually plucked up the courage to report it to the police. For those noble Lords of a mathematical bent, 77% of 1.5 million is not a million miles away from 1 million, and if you multiply that by 100, you start to get some sense of the scale of what we are talking about. It is staggering.

The second point that it would be helpful to take on board is the complexity of stalking. Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists have developed the “stalking risk profile”, the authoritative tool used to understand and codify the different types of stalking. It outlines five different stalker types, and I shall briefly take noble Lords through them and explain why as I do it.

The five types are broken down by the prevalence of each in a clinical setting. What is relevant for today’s amendment is not the first and predominant stalker type, known as the rejected stalker, which has the highest prevalence of violence and will pursue the victim, often a former partner, for either reconciliation or revenge. The rejected stalker type is responsible for 54% of stalking incidents—by a strange coincidence, almost exactly the estimated amount of stalking incidents that are domestic-abuse related.

How about the other 46%? Before I go on to that, I pay tribute to the Government, the NPCC and College of Policing for the new national framework for delivery for policing violence against women and girls announced by Maggie Blyth last month. It is genuinely a very positive leap forward for dealing with stalking, primarily domestic stalking. However, even domestic abuse stalking is complex. Alongside the framework, as you can see on the College of Policing website, is a document called the “framework toolkit”, which breaks down by type of incident all the different types of stalking and harassment that are likely to take place; it then subdivides them into the myriad different laws and types of guidance that the police should consider when trying to work out what type of stalking incident this is. I am a lay man and I know a certain amount about it, but my observation would be that, in many cases, one would require a PhD in criminology to follow the decision tree of all the ways in which one might respond to an incident, and how best to deal with it.

What about the other four stalker types? We have the resentful stalker, which is about 15% of that 1.5 million. They often have a deliberate intent to cause fear or distress to a victim in response to perceived mistreatment. Legal sanctions often exacerbate their behaviour, and they frequently require psychiatric treatment. I would venture to guess that the resentful stalker is in many cases responsible for the shameful incidents that we hear about, whereby leading politicians, particularly female politicians in this country, from the other end of the Palace of Westminster, receive frequently hateful and disturbing threats to themselves and their safety, as well as that of their families and staff. Some 15% of stalkers are doing that.

The next category is the intimacy-seeking stalker. This is somebody who is quite frequently mentally unstable and wants to have an intimate relationship with the person they are stalking. You may recall one or two quite well-known women, usually, in the public eye, perhaps well-known journalists—in one instance, somebody who not infrequently appears on “Newsnight”, who has had the experience of being stalked by somebody in this category since they met briefly many years ago at university. I suspect that that individual has received not just 100 instances of stalking by this individual— I imagine it probably goes into the thousands.

The next category is the wonderfully named incompetent stalker, which represents about 11% of the 1.5 million. This individual tries to forge a relationship with the victim in socially inappropriate ways. Again, frequently, psychiatric help is required to try to make them understand what it is that they are doing.

In the fifth and last category is the predatory stalker. They stalk victims for sexual gratification, often in preparation for an assault, and sex offender treatment may be required. I suspect that in that category goes a certain rather infamous gentleman who until recently was in the police force but is now a guest at Her Majesty’s pleasure for a very long time indeed.

So how can the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office help those charged with protecting these 1.5 million victims, particularly the substantial number—46%—who are not being targeted by the rejected, domestic abuse-type stalker? The new framework makes a good start, but it does not make use of some of the very effective initiatives that are out there, such as MASIP, which I discussed briefly with the Minister this morning, or Lifeline, a specialist training course for individuals who have to look at stalking developed by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. It is extraordinarily effective, and dovetails very effectively into Domestic Abuse Matters, which is the predominant domestic abuse training that police and other agencies are receiving.

I do not expect the Minister to stand up at the end of this and say, “Lord Russell and all the rest of you, you’re completely right, we’ve totally taken it on board and we’re going to do exactly what you ask”. I would be rather alarmed if she did. But what I would ask her and her colleagues and advisers to do is to carefully consider this problem—the scale and the sheer complexity of stalking, particularly non-domestic abuse stalking—because it not going to go away.

The reaction of the Government and statutory agencies to the incidence of violence against women and girls over the last three or four years strongly reminds me of the fable about the frog who was burned alive sitting in water that was gradually heating up, as incident after incident, story after story, heats up in this case the political temperature, until the politician in the bath suddenly finds that they are soon going to be in need of medical help, because they have allowed this situation to develop. Stalking has similar characteristics; it is not going to go away.

Many people in public life, especially the lady politicians we were referring to earlier, know exactly what it feels like to be stalked. Based on the law of averages, I would be astonished if some of the Ministers dealing with this, their advisers and extended teams, have not themselves personally experienced stalking in some form or another. Stalking is not selective when it chooses its victims.

This amendment is designed to strongly suggest to Her Majesty’s Government that, in order to avoid the equivalent of a dreadful Sarah Everard moment that is very specifically related to stalking, they should voluntarily choose to act proactively and put in place an effective and comprehensive approach to enable the sheer complexity and scale of stalking to be understood better—and they should do that now. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Haskel) (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I invite the noble Baroness to speak.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and his ongoing determination on this subject. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, must also be commended as she not only educated me on the whole subject, way back when, but has shown that same tenacity—ditto the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who regularly shares her story with us. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, in commending John Clough and others for their untiring campaigning on this. I have met John Clough; he is a truly wonderful man.

I totally get the sentiment of what the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, are saying. He and I spoke earlier; we reflected on the journey we have come on, since I got into your Lordships’ House almost 10 years ago, in terms of the perception and awareness of and attitudes towards domestic violence, domestic abuse and stalking. While domestic abuse was certainly on the radar, there was a clunking attitude towards dealing with it; stalking is one step behind it, but to say we have gone backwards is just not the case—we have made great progress. However, I acknowledge—I think he sees this—that we have further to go, particularly in training on stalking and domestic abuse. It is a most dreadful crime; the impact on victims can be so dreadful.

I talked at length in Committee about the many actions to address stalking that we are taking through the tackling violence against women and girls strategy. I will not go through them all again, but the Government are totally committed to protecting and supporting the victims of stalking. We are determined to do everything we can to stop perpetrators at the earliest opportunity. On the point of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, that the VAWG strategy does not deal with male victims, I say that it makes it clear that, while the term “violence against women and girls” is used throughout the document, it refers to all victims of the relevant offences, including stalking. I am glad he raised that, as it allows me to clarify it.

The noble Lord also brought up the point that stalking is not only an awful crime but a very complex and multifaceted one. We talked about that earlier as well—the resentful stalker who may go after politicians, the intimacy-seeking stalker, the incompetent stalker and the predatory stalker. They come in all forms. As he said, many are not former partners of their victims, including so-called intimacy seekers and predatory stalkers. Within each category, there is a wide range of different types of stalking behaviour. Therefore, the Government totally acknowledge that the police need to be well informed about the many characteristics of stalking and the stalker to effectively investigate stalking cases. He can rest assured—I know he does—that it is a priority for the Government. I empathise with the aim of this amendment, but it is important to acknowledge the progress that is being made in the work we are doing.

It is vital that the police are provided with the correct materials and training to deal with stalking cases appropriately. That is why, in 2019, the College of Policing released a set of new advice products on stalking for police first responders, call handlers and investigators. These make clear, for example—I say this in response to my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern—the key differences between stalking and harassment. A range of advice and guidance products has been published by the College of Policing for forces to deliver locally to help responders to investigate stalking effectively, understand risks and respond appropriately to stalking cases. I know that training is also available to the police from providers in the charitable and private sectors. The noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and I talked earlier about the work of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which runs the National Stalking Helpline and has been piloting a new training course for police called “Stalking Matters”.

Within Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, all new probation staff and prison offender managers are required to complete mandatory domestic abuse awareness online learning, which includes a specific module on stalking. The module has recently been updated and rewritten, based on current research, by subject matter and academic experts within HM Prison and Probation Service. A process map has been developed to set out a consistent approach to working with stalking in the probation service, which provides links to relevant support and guidance documents, as well as learning that staff can complete. Furthermore, the stalking practitioner guidance is being finalised; this aims to raise awareness of the nature of, and various risks associated with, stalking. It will also direct practitioners to the support that is available within HM Prison and Probation Service when working with perpetrators of stalking.

When we had an opportunity to speak earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, and I talked about the complexity involved; while the report from Maggie Blyth was excellent, there is complexity in practitioner understanding. I will take that away and we can perhaps discuss it further; there is no point having these things if they are not readily and easily understandable.

I now come to training within the CPS. E-learning modules are available to prosecutors; these cover the stalking and harassment offences, with emphasis on building a strong case, working closely with the police and engaging with victims throughout the legal process. Alongside the online course, elements of stalking and harassment are also covered in tutor-led mandatory training on proactive disclosure and hate crime. This training supports the Crown Prosecution Service’s legal guidance on stalking and harassment and restraining orders, the joint stalking and harassment protocol, and the associated checklist that must be used by police and prosecutors to ensure that they are taking the correct action in stalking cases.

The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, talked about police resources. She will know that we have a substantial police settlement for 2022-23 but her underlying point, I think, is that we have to put it to good use, and that the Government’s priorities need to be reflected in the work that the police do. She and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, also talked about the importance of data, the monitoring of ongoing work and Parliament’s duty to hold the Government to account on the policies that they make.

Of course, the police, the CPS and the probation service are operationally independent of government. The noble Lord, Lord Russell, and I discussed earlier the issue of mandating what training they should receive, especially, as I have just set out, when there is so much good work happening already. There is always more to do, but I do not think that the mandating of training is the best way of doing this, given the good work that is going on. There is also a very real risk that, if we were to legislate for one crime type, it might then suggest to law enforcement agencies that it should be prioritised over others. I know that that is not what the noble Lord and the noble Baroness seek. Appropriate training for criminal justice system professionals on tackling stalking is vital, but so too is training on tackling domestic abuse, sexual offences and other crime types. We do not regard these as less important; neither, I know, do the noble Lord or the noble Baroness.

In acknowledging and empathising with the sentiment behind the amendment put forward by the noble Lord, I assure him that the training provided to professionals working with the criminal justice system on stalking is robust and helps to address issues such as early identification of stalking cases—but I also acknowledge that there is more work to be done. I hope that the noble Lord will be content to withdraw his amendment in the knowledge that I have addressed his concerns as far as I can, and acknowledging the work that has been done. I know that we will come back to these matters at a future occasion.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for what she said. As usual, she has been thorough and comprehensive. She said what I would have expected her to say, and I thank her for that. I understand that there is a certain point beyond which she is unable to go; I will come back to that in a minute.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for reminding us—and me—that stalking affects a very large number of men, as well as women. It is easy to forget that, as there has been so much focus on violence against women and girls. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, reminded us that we are at about our 10-year anniversary of trying to get Her Majesty’s Government to focus on this and acknowledge that it will not go away. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, said, it ain’t getting better, it is getting worse, and we do not completely understand why this is so badly the case.

The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, was able to remind us from his own experience that guidance is not enough, in and of itself. The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, reminded us of the role of champions such as Laura Richards, and others, who have been speaking up very effectively for the many victims—giving them a voice, trying to make us understand how they feel and what they have gone through. As she said, stalking is insidious. I suspect that, by the law of averages, we all probably know somebody who has been stalked, albeit that it is probably not a subject that we would readily raise around the dinner table. I suspect that, if we spoke to such people who we know—if they were prepared to open up about what their experience was like—and listened to them and watched the look in their eyes as they spoke about it, it would be pretty wrenching; that is the reality of it.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, made a very good point about the judiciary, with which I absolutely agree; the judiciary needs training just as much as the rest of us. However, for the judiciary to be able to exercise its duties properly, it is incredibly important that among all the different bodies charged with identifying when a case of stalking is serious enough to become the subject of a prosecution, the way that this is pursued and the case is put together, by people who know what they are doing, is as watertight as it is humanly possible to be. However well intended and well trained, if a judge is faced with a prosecution case that, frankly, is not watertight, then, however strongly he or she may feel that an injustice is being done, if the case being put forward is inadequate, the law must follow its duty, possibly deciding not in favour of the victim—and it would not be the victim’s fault. That is the essence of what we are trying to avoid; it is going on and it will continue to go on until we really grasp it.

I will not detain your Lordships. I had hoped that we would do this in 30 minutes, but we will do it in under 45 minutes. I thank the Minister again for what she said, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. There is a huge focus on the inputs in many of these interactions from the Front Bench: there is a long list of money for this, an initiative for that, this service having this and that service having that. To come back to the issue of data, in the future I would like to hear less about inputs and more about outputs. We need the evidence that these input are actually working and making a difference. I know we will come back to this subject, but I genuinely believe that, until and unless all the different bodies dealing with these distraught victims, who come to the police perhaps after 100 instances of insidious stalking, are equipped with the knowledge and experience they need to really grab hold of it and give victims some justice, it will continue to haunt us and, indeed, stalk us. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 114D withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I raised my opposition to a version of this amendment previously. For once, I was planning to keep out of the gender identity argument—although I agree with both the speech and the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes—but I feel I must make some response to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who said that the concept of gender is causing no problems in the law or among judges. I am delighted about that, but let me tell you that the concept of gender is causing a huge number of problems for many women.

The judge advises that we need to talk to young people who include trans people among their friends. I point out that I have trans people among my friends and spend a huge amount of time talking to young people. There is not just one view on this; there are lots of views. One of the problems we have to recognise is that open debate about gender and trans issues is often chilled, for fear of accusations of hate or bigotry—and, ironically, most of the misogynistic abuse that I and other women have received in recent months and years has been on this issue of being gender-critical.

I will now go back to what I was going to say. My opposition to this amendment is based on a key concern: the need to avoid fuelling a narrative of fear that posits the idea that terrible and unimaginably horrific, but rare, instances of sexual violence and murder are part of a continuum of widespread misogynistic attitudes. This can too easily align everything from online trolling and catcalling to rape and domestic abuse under the label of misogyny—hatred of women.

There is limited time because we have very major things to discuss, so I will focus my remarks. I appreciate that the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, explicitly distinguishes between sexual violence crimes and other forms of crime that may be motivated by misogynistic intent, and that it is not an attempt to create any new criminal offences, being more concerned with the police recording and reporting of the number of crimes motivated by hostility towards sex and, sometimes, gender. This, we are told, is crucial to identifying patterns of behaviour and targeting police resources, so that we can build a national picture of violence against women and girls. However, hate crime legislation generally, as echoed in this amendment, in fact means that the data collected is based almost entirely on subjective perceptions and will not allow an accurate picture to emerge.

The amendment talks of a reported crime in which

“(a) the victim or any other person perceived the alleged offender, at the time of or immediately before or after the offence, to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on sex, or (b) the victim or any other person perceived the crime to be motivated (wholly or partly) by hostility or prejudice towards persons who are of a particular sex”.

So this amendment would not help us understand data as fact but more how victims—or any other third parties—subjectively see either the motivation of the alleged offenders or the crime. To compound the issue, there is no legal or formal definition of “hostility”, so the CPS suggests that we use the everyday understanding of the word, which includes ill will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike. This can lead only to the possibility of an ever- widening set of crimes being badged as misogynistic, with the only evidence being subjective.

The practical outcomes could be severe and serious, as the amendment would alter sentencing. This means, essentially, that, if someone thinks or feels that someone else is being hateful towards them, and the hostility in carrying out the crime is based on sex and explains their offence, that is enough for that person to be locked up in prison for longer. There is also a more insidious punishment: this amendment might mean that more and more behaviour—we know that we mean especially that of men and boys—is deemed to be misogynistic, destroying the reputation of those people once they are labelled as bigots who hate women, according to this categorisation, without necessarily being branded as such in reality.

According to the campaign literature sent out ahead of this discussion, this label of hostility via sex can be used to imply far more than hostility. However minor the original crime, if it is labelled as sex-based hostility we are told that it is an almost inevitable slippery slope and that this is the kind of person who will carry out, if they are not stopped, the most heinous crimes, such as rape, sexual violence and murder. Meanwhile, HOPE not Hate sent round a missive saying that this kind of sex-hostility is a slip road to far-right extremism.

Finally, the Fawcett Society claims that this amendment will give women protection from crime and help ensure the safety of women and girls. I say that it will not: if anything, it could distract the police from the practical, difficult but essential work of on-the-ground patrolling of streets, painstaking investigations, and so on, and the courage to see through those investigations and prosecutions. It might take valuable resources for the police away from policing if they are tangled up in the reporting and monitoring of staff and data which I do not think, as I have shown, is reliable. Consider one of the most gross examples of the abuse of women and girls: the grooming gangs that operated in parts of the north-west of England. Those women and girls would not have been helped one iota had those crimes been called misogynistic. The shameful neglect in the investigation and prosecution of that incident was surely not about whether it was seen as being driven by hostility to sex. This amendment avoids the real problem, is tokenistic and will not help women at all.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I have put my name to this amendment and will speak very briefly, not least because I have the privilege of being one of the Deputy Speakers of this House. I would just remind noble Lords that we are at Report, and at Report we are not meant to give either Second Reading or Committee speeches—it is a discourtesy to the House to be discursive. That is all that needs to be said on that.

Some noble Lords may be familiar with a newspaper that is normally far too left-wing for me, the Daily Telegraph. There is an article in today’s paper by a gentleman called Charles Hymas, which says—and I have no reason to believe it is not true, since I understand that there are fairly close links between the aforementioned organ and the party in government—that there are quite a few quite senior Back-Benchers in another place who are very keen to use this amendment, assuming your Lordships pass it, to enable them to have a proper discussion in another place about this issue and to decide then, as our elected representatives, whether this case has sufficient merit to be put into law and in what manner and form that should happen. I suggest that they are rather better qualified to do that than we are.

Having said that, my Lords, I will support this amendment. I think we should send it back to another place for them to have another look. The other place is also a better place to have what can be an extremely contorted and overimaginative debate about gender and the relative merits of sex and gender.

As others have said, I am not sure that generationally we are the best-equipped assembly to opine on these subjects. That does not mean that we are not able to have a point of view, and I am aware that some noble Lords and noble Baronesses have a very strong point of view. I simply point out that, however strongly they may feel, there are a great many others of a younger generation, and down the other end, who feel differently. I support this amendment, because I think your Lordships should give the other place a chance to decide for itself.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope the noble Lord does not think I am being discourteous to the House by making a short intervention in this important debate. We have to be very careful about legal definitions of sex and gender. Primarily, the definitions are not legal but are in fact biological, as I have said in this Chamber before. That is a problem. That is one of the reasons why I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, just said. For example, we have to understand that there are situations in which there might well be problems with—whatever you call it—misogyny or hate. Take a transgender woman who was originally assigned as a male and still has the genes of a male, and possibly some of the hormonal function of a male, who competes in a sporting event. That is a difficult issue that has not yet been properly dealt with. Clearly, it is quite likely that from time to time those sorts of situations will cause considerable anger, hostility and all sorts of effects that might be an offence under the Bill. We at least need to record that and decide how we deal with it.