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7.36 pm

Mr. Howard: With the leave of the House, I should like to reply to the debate.

We have just heard a ludicrous speech that was unworthy of the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Ms Anderson). She claimed credit a moment ago for the Leader of the Opposition, who she said had put party politics aside in his speech on the Loyal Address. That accusation could never be levelled at the hon. Lady in light of her contribution.

The truth about the matter that we are debating this evening is that stalking is a serious menace from which countless women, in particular, suffer greatly. Nothing could do more harm to those women than to cobble together an unprepared Bill, rush it on to the statute book, and pretend that it offered them relief. Earlier today, I paid tribute to the hon. Lady and congratulated her on raising the matter last year in her private Member's Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Sir M. Shersby) said in his letter--which the hon. Lady quoted in her speech--the Bill provided a useful basis for discussion with Ministers.

We discussed the issue with her, but her Bill would not have provided an adequate statutory remedy to the mischief with which we all want to deal. It was deficient in a number of respects, which I identified with some precision earlier this afternoon. It does no one any justice to gather an absolute farrago of inaccuracies in an attempt to demonstrate that the Government's reaction to the hon. Lady's Bill last year was based on a desire--the hon. Lady made this specific accusation--not to support an Opposition private Member's Bill. What utter nonsense.

Ms Janet Anderson: It is not.

Mr. Howard: Let me give the hon. Lady an example from this Session. The hon. Member for Glasgow, Provan (Mr. Wray) introduced a private Member's Bill on knives. He and the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) said, "We should like to introduce a Bill on knives, and this is the Bill we want." They showed us the Bill and we said,

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"We don't think much of your Bill, because we don't think it would work. We are keen to help you if you want to put a sensible measure to deal with knives on the statute book, and we will provide you with a Bill." That is exactly what we did.

With the Government's full support, the hon. Gentleman, who came first in the private Members' ballot--a Labour Member--introduced a Bill on knives, which was drafted and proposed by the Government. We do not have the slightest difficulty supporting a Bill proposed by a Labour Member. To suggest the contrary is completely untrue from start to finish. The hon. Lady should know that, and she should know better than to make disgraceful accusations, as she did during her appalling speech.

The hon. Lady is giggling away on the Front Bench. She had the temerity to claim that she had consulted the National Anti-stalking and Harassment Campaign. I have the specific authority of its director to say that she rejects very strongly the idea that the hon. Lady consulted that body about her stalking proposals. That was simply not the case, and that fact should be placed on the record.

I remind the hon. Lady exactly why her Bill was defective. In the first place, it would not have provided a defence for people who are engaged in legitimate activities, such as journalists and others who have been mentioned by Opposition Members, including the hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George). In that respect, it was too wide. We had to give the matter a great deal of thought, and to consult carefully before we were able to propose a solution to that problem.

In another respect, the hon. Lady's Bill was too narrow, because it proceeded by way of a list of examples of conduct that would constitute stalking. The trouble with such a list is that, although the Bill may say--as hers did--that the list is without prejudice to the generality of the scope of the clause, such matters are subject to principles of statutory construction and interpretation.

One of those principles--if the hon. Lady is interested--is called the ejusdem generis rule, which requires such a list to be construed as though it could be extended to cover things of the same nature as those in the list. As the list in the hon. Lady's Bill concentrated entirely on activities characteristic of classic stalking, it would not have covered activities that constitute racial harassment or that come under the heading of harassment of one neighbour by another. That is the truth of the matter.

Ms Anderson: That was never intended.

Mr. Howard: In that case, the world at large will welcome the fact that our Bill does intend to cover such activities.

Ms Anderson: Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

Mr. Howard: No, not until I have finished making this point.

Many people will welcome the fact that our Bill gives protection to victims of racial harassment and to the victims of the activities of noisy neighbours. They will not have counted it an advantage of the hon. Lady's Bill that it excluded such activities.

Ms Anderson: May I reaffirm what the right hon. and learned Gentleman clearly understands? I want to put on

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record the fact that my Bill was never intended to deal with the problems of criminally anti-social neighbours and racial harassment. As I am sure he knows, the Opposition have for some time had proposals on those matters. We are pleased that the Government have at last addressed those problems and have copied many of our proposals.

Mr. Howard: Let me explain the deficiencies of the hon. Lady's approach in words that are more pointed and eloquent than any I could devise. At the Suzy Lamplugh Trust conference in October, a victim of a stalker told my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, "If you have a list of activities which you ban, my stalker will simply sit down and work out another activity with which to torment me." That was the deficiency of the hon. Lady's Bill, and the present Bill seeks to remedy that.

Ms Anderson rose--

Mr. Howard: I believe that the Bill does remedy that deficiency, which is why it was worth waiting--

Ms Anderson rose--

Mr. Howard: I shall give way in a moment.

It was worth waiting a few months--not many months--to prepare proper and effective legislation, which I believe we have achieved with our Bill.

Ms Anderson: I refer the Home Secretary to the definition in my Bill. Indeed it had a list--it drew on the experience of other countries that have anti-stalking laws--but it was not exhaustive. We were careful to include a catch-all phrase, which was presumably why he said at the time that the Bill was drawn too widely. It referred to a person who

"does any other act or acts in connection with another person so as to be reasonably likely to cause that other person to feel harassed, alarmed, distressed"

and so on.

I emphasise the fact that the list was not exhaustive. Perhaps the victim who spoke to the Minister of State at the conference did not understand that.

Mr. Howard: I fear that it is the hon. Lady who does not understand. I shall explain it to her yet again. We said that her Bill was too wide--not because of the clause to which she has just referred, but because it did not provide a defence to people engaged in legitimate activities. I have already said that twice, and this is the third time. I shall say it a fourth time if necessary, but that is the truth of the matter.

The clause to which the hon. Lady referred would not have provided a solution to the problem that I identified earlier. Lists are construed according to the nature of the activities that are put in them. That is the deficiency of the list approach, which is why we said, correctly, that the hon. Lady's Bill was too narrow in that respect.

Mr. McNamara: The right hon. and learned Gentleman is jumping from place to place. He referred to the ejusdem generis rule in relation to racial harassment. My hon. Friend's Bill stated specifically that all other matters that reflect stalking would be included. The ejusdem generis rule would have covered that.

Mr. Howard: It would not have covered that, because the ejusdem generis rule means that the list is interpreted

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and constructed in accordance with the nature of the activities that are identified. It is the hon. Gentleman who is rushing about all over the place. He is trying to contend that his hon. Friend's Bill would have covered racial harassment. The hon. Lady herself has just argued that she never intended that her Bill should cover racial harassment. The hon. Gentleman cannot have it both ways.

Mr. McNamara: I did not say that. I specifically said to the right hon. and learned Gentleman that he was jumping the ground by saying that my hon. Friend's Bill was not covered by the rule because it included racial harassment. We said specifically that it did not include racial harassment, so the rule applied.

Mr. Howard: That is precisely why the Bill was too narrow. I do not know why the hon. Gentleman is getting so excited about that. It was too narrow because it did not cover those other activities from which people suffer a great deal of harm, which give rise to a great deal of mischief and for which Parliament should provide a remedy. That is why our Bill deals with those aspects of the mischief, and specifically provides remedies for those problems.

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