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Mr. Kevin McNamara (Kingston upon Hull, North): The right hon. and learned Gentleman is talking about offences committed under the Bill and the fact that a person who breaches it may then be subject to another criminal offence. What if a person is convicted under another statute, but harassment takes place afterwards? Would it be possible for the judge to inform the convicted person that, if he indulged in harassment, he would automatically be subject to another criminal offence?
Mr. Howard: I am not sure that it would be open to the judge to say anything precisely along those lines. It would of course be open to the judge, as it is at the moment, to draw the attention of someone who has been convicted and who is before him of the perils that he will face if he continues with a particular course of conduct. As I have sought to explain, there will be particular new and additional remedies available to the victim in such circumstances, but I am not sure that the precise warning that the hon. Gentleman has in mind would be the sort of language that would be likely to emanate from the judicial bench.
I have set out the aims of the Bill as it applies to England and Wales. In Scotland, the aims are identical. The existing common law in Scotland already adequately covers acts that cause harassment, so no new criminal offences are proposed. A new delict--the Scottish equivalent of a tort--is, however, provided for in the Bill.
The Government have tabled an amendment that would allow the Bill's provisions to be extended to Northern Ireland by negative resolution. It is important that the people of Northern Ireland are offered the same protection from harassment as people in the rest of the United Kingdom.
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I have set out the principles that lie behind the Bill and why we believe that it will offer an effective remedy against harassment. It may help the House if I briefly explain the Bill's structure.
Clause 1 describes the course of conduct that amounts to harassment in England and Wales and sets out the defences available. Clause 2 makes it a criminal offence for a person to pursue a course of conduct in breach of clause 1. Clause 3 creates a civil tort in relation to the course of conduct described in clause 1. Clause 4 creates the more serious offence of pursuing a course of conduct that puts someone in fear of violence. Clause 5 gives criminal courts the power, when sentencing a person for an offence under clause 2 or 4, to make a restraining order.
Clause 6 provides that actions for damages under clause 3 are subject to a six-year limitation period rather than the three-year period applicable to personal injury cases. Clause 7 defines certain terms used in the earlier clauses, notably that a course of conduct is conduct that occurs on at least two occasions, and includes speech.
Clauses 8 to 11 apply to Scotland. Clause 8 creates a delict. Clause 9 provides that breach of an order made under clause 8 is a criminal offence, similar to the provisions for England and Wales. Clause 10 allows for the award of damages. Clause 11 creates the concept of a restraining order in the Scottish criminal courts.
To ensure that the work of the intelligence and security services is not compromised, clause 12 provides that the Secretary of State for the Home Department may certify, retrospectively, that a course of conduct carried out by a specified person on a specified occasion related to national security, the economic well-being of the United Kingdom, or the prevention or detection of serious crimes, and was done on behalf of the Crown.
The Bill does not bind the Crown or, therefore, agents of the Crown, so the intelligence and security services--and other investigative agencies such as customs and benefit fraud investigators pursuing their responsibilities--are exempt from its provisions. The certification procedure is intended to ensure that that exemption can be proved in the situations described, quickly and effectively.
The remaining clauses deal with the extent, commencement and short title of the Bill.
Those, then, are the Government's proposals to deal with stalking. As I have said, their effects will go beyond what might be termed classic stalking to provide protection for others who are persecuted by anti-social behaviour. The proposals are part of the Government's aim to make the streets and communities of Britain safer.
I am sorry that, despite all the fine words of the Opposition on this subject, the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) has tabled amendments that would significantly weaken the Bill and reduce the protection that it would afford the public, but perhaps he will in due course be able to dispel that impression, which is certainly the impression that we have formed of the amendments that have been tabled. As always, we look forward to hearing from him and from his colleagues.
I commend the Bill to the House.
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Mr. Jack Straw (Blackburn):
Like the Secretary of State for the Home Department, for whom Christmas has come about a week early, I begin with a tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Ms Anderson), who will be winding up for the Opposition on Second Reading. Concern about stalking, the absence of any criminal remedies and the inadequacy of civil remedies has been widely held for many years. There was a debate about that in 1994 during proceedings on the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, but it took the unusual determination and tenacity of my hon. Friend to translate that concern into a coherent Bill against stalking, which she introduced on 6 March.
For reasons that I shall come to, Ministers decided to block my hon. Friend's Bill when it was due for its Second Reading on 10 May. Prompted, I believe, by public anger at their refusal to back that Bill, on 9 July, Ministers published a consultative paper, "Stalking--The Solutions" and finally this Bill on 5 December. When it passes through the other place and becomes law early next year, my hon. Friend can feel proud of her achievement in ensuring that, at long last, people who are subject to the pain and trauma of stalking have better protection from the law than they ever did before.
We support the Bill, although we want it to be improved in Committee, and we have agreed with the Government to secure all its stages in the House today and tomorrow. Given that agreement, I was astonished--although perhaps I should never be surprised by words from the Secretary of State or his political adviser--by an accusation today in The Times and the Daily Mail that Labour was, in the Secretary of State's words, "reneging" on a promise to back the Government's anti-stalking Bill.
The Secretary of State must know that that allegation is completely untrue. He knows, because he was involved in the discussions, that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department said that the allegation was "nasty", not an adjective that I would use. Where both sides have agreed that there will be a certain amount of time taken to get through an agreed measure, it is unacceptable for one side then to complain when the other side seeks to ensure that those undertakings are carried through. Nothing that we have done in tabling amendments to the Bill in any sense undermines the spirit and letter of our agreement to ensure that the Bill secures all its stages in the House today and in the half day tomorrow.
I understand from my hon. Friends that there have even been complaints that we have tabled amendments at all. That comes rich from a Government who have tabled five amendments to the Bill.
Mr. George Howarth (Knowsley, North):
To their own Bill.
The Secretary of State's complaint about the Bill of hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen was that it was too simplistic a solution I paraphrase to a very complicated matter. Of course we accept his injunction that it is better to have no Bill at all than a bad Bill. Given all the bad Bills that Labour Members have had to deal with week after week, I only wish that he had followed that injunction.
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When my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen introduced her Bill in March, she gave some chilling case studies of women who had been stalked. In some cases, some sort of legal sanction had finally been imposed on the stalker. In most cases, however, the stalkers had managed to evade or avoid any sanction. My hon. Friend said:
Individual acts of stalking such as those mentioned by the Police Federation--the odd letter of affection or the occasional bouquet of flowers--may be no more than eccentric, and should not bring down the force of the criminal or civil law. What causes the intense distress and so marks out stalking is the persistence and continuity of the conduct.
A similar situation exists in relation to anti-social behaviour by neighbours. In a densely populated island like Britain, we must all accept that life in cities and towns will not always be peace and quiet. Most of us are willing to tolerate the occasional noisy disruption from neighbours; but when disruption becomes continuous and when those causing it ignore reasonable requests to desist and intimidate those who dare to complain, the effect, like that of stalking, shifts from being an occasional nuisance to a continuous nightmare
In the past, such continuous, chronic criminal behaviour has generally been dealt with informally through community pressure, or perhaps by the informal intervention of the police, rather than through the formal involvement of the criminal law.
When the criminal justice system has tried to deal with stalking or neighbour harassment, on the whole it has failed. That its because it has tended to chop up the continuous film of persistent misbehaviour into individual, discrete snapshots. Furthermore, as the Secretary of State mentioned, it has been required to prove intent. In other words, the criminal justice system has sought to turn a chronic condition into a series of acute ones.
My hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen sought to fill the gap in respect of stalking with the Bill that she introduced in March. Her Bill prohibited
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That was not the first time that the Government had blocked action against stalking. In 1994 and again in 1995, Ministers dead-batted calls for stalking to be tackled, using as their reason the fact that they were conducting a study of anti-stalking laws and definitions in other countries. That was the essence of the answers given to my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Mr. Michael) on 17 July 1995 and to my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich (Ms Jowell) on 6 February this year.
That study into other countries seems to have led Ministers to a negative conclusion. Other countries with anti-stalking measures, such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia, have each, I understand, used fairly specific definitions. The Bill, however, provides a much looser, more general definition of harassment, with the intention that over time the courts will gradually fill in the gaps by helping to define the test of reasonable knowledge in clause 1(2) and the defence of reasonableness in subsection (3), and to develop the tort of harassment provided in clause 3.
I understand the Government's intentions. Having myself, like the Secretary of State, been brought up in the English legal tradition, I have enormous respect for the intellectual ingenuity of the common law and for our courts' capacity to grow great oaks of jurisprudence from the smallest shoots. But a balance must be struck, especially in the criminal law, between an offence general enough to deal effectively with the mischief complained of, and an offence so vague that in practice courts will not convict.
For that reason, we favour a belt-and-braces approach in the Bill, unless we are persuaded to the contrary by the wisdom of the Minister of State, Home Office, the right hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean). We do not seek to disturb the general definition in clause 1. However, without prejudice to the generality of that definition, which is important to our amendment, we believe that the Bill should give some detail of the circumstances in which stalking may arise. That is the purpose of our amendment, which can be considered in more detail in Committee on the Floor of the House later today.
In May this year the Secretary of State wrote to me to explain why the Government would not support the Bill presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen. The Minister of State wrote to my hon. Friend in the same terms. The objection then, which I ask my hon. Friends to note carefully, was that the scope of my hon. Friend's Bill was too wide. Today we hear that the objection to my hon. Friend's Bill was that the scope of her Bill was too narrow. I am confused, as is the Secretary of State, I think.
The Secretary of State went on the record in The Times today with the churlish and nonsensical allegation that we would seek to block progress on what amounts to my hon. Friend's Bill. He said that our proposals
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"Those who describe stalking as merely a nuisance should try speaking to a victim."
She quoted with approval the view of the Police Federation that
"it is frightening enough knowing that your every move is being watched, that you are being followed. But what if you are being trailed day after day, bombarded with unwanted letters, flowers and gifts, plagued with telephone calls and even go to collect your child from school to find a stranger has beaten you to it. It can ruin your life and"--
said the Police Federation--
"that is what is happening now to ordinary people, mainly women."--[Official Report, 6 March 1996; Vol. 273, c. 370.]
Given that stalking can and has ruined the lives of many ordinary people for many years, the first question before the House is why existing law has proved so inadequate to counter the crime. One reason, I suggest, is that criminal law in England and Wales has developed to deal mainly with acute incidents of criminal behaviour--a murder, a robbery, a theft and so on--but it is far less developed in dealing adequately with behaviour such as stalking or serious neighbourhood disruption, which is continuous and where the whole is infinitely worse than the sum of the parts or any individual part.
"would significantly reduce the public's protection from harassment."
The Secretary of State owes it to the House to tell us, when he winds up the debate, which of his objections to my hon. Friend's Bill is correct. Was it his objection in May, when he said that her Bill was too wide, or is it his objection today, when he says that it was too narrow? The two statements cannot both be correct.
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