Jess Phillips announces measures to give stalking victims more protection – UK politics live

Claire Waxman, London’s independent victims’ commissioner, has welcomed the anti-stalking measures announced by the Home Office today. (See 9.50am.) A review of stalking legislation and greater use of stalking protection orders are both things she called for after her London stalking review.

Waxman said:

Too often, I hear from victims facing relentless, terrifying behaviour from stalkers, only for the police or CPS to downgrade it to a lesser offence, such as malicious communications or harassment.

It is clear the current stalking laws are failing to protect victims and I urge government to now proceed swiftly with their review in this area.

Here is the full list of anti-stalking measures announced by the Home Office today.

• A “right to know” should ensure that the police tell victims the identity of stalkers as soon as possible.

• Stalking protection orders will be more widely available. The Home Office says:

These orders can ban stalkers from going within a certain distance of their victims or contacting them, and can also compel them to attend a perpetrator programme to address the root causes of their behaviour.

Currently, these can only be applied when an offender is convicted and when a protection order was in place before they went on trial. Once implemented, under new measures, courts will be given the power to impose restrictions on perpetrators after they have been convicted even if there was no protection order in place before they went on trial, stopping, for example, offenders from contacting their victims from prison. Courts will also be able to directly apply protection orders on those who have been acquitted if there is enough evidence to suggest that they are still a risk to the victim.

• Stalking will be definited in statutory gudiance, so that “proper protections are put in place for every victim of stalking”.

• National standards for stalking perpetrator programmes will be published.

• New data on stalking offences will be published by the Home Office.

• The Home Office has said it will accept or partially accept all the recommendations in the “super-complaint” organised by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust in 2022 into the way police forces deal with stalking.

• Stalking legislation will be reviewed. This will “determine whether the law could be changed to support police to better identify stalking and arrest offenders.”

Under the package of anti-stalking measures announced today, the courts will be able to impose stalking protection orders on people in prison. Explaining why this was needed, Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, told LBC:

Judges will be able to hand out stalking protection orders to people on conviction, which they currently can’t do, which will stop people being stalked by people in prison, which I’m afraid to say, is a very real thing, and it happened to me,.

I had somebody who was in prison for harming – well, seeking to harm me – and then was able to write letters to me, contact me from prison.

Phillips said she had come across “quite a lot of cases” where ex-partners in prison for crimes against their wives or girlfriends were able to stalk them online from prison and contact them from prison.

Asked how stalking affected her, Phillips said:

I think that for most victims, what you try and do is diminish it at first. You try and assume that … it’s just one of those things where it’s somebody who keeps showing advances towards you, or, you know, you live rent-free in someone’s head when you’re a politician, until the point at which it ramps up and it begins to control you. And I’m a person with quite a lot of power. So these, these crimes are usually about power and control.

Good morning. Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, was the government voice on the morning broadcast round. She says she is unveiling six measures to protect the victims of stalking, including “right to know” guidance intended to ensure that the police tell victims the identity of online stalkers as soon as they can. Speaking on Times Radio, Phillips said:

I have been a victim of stalking, and I wasn’t told [the identity of the stalker]. I didn’t have the right to know. And in most of the cases of my stalkers, they made it clear who they were as part of their desire to control and frighten me. I’m afraid to say that I’ve had more than one in my life.

Phillips also cited the case of the activist and former Coronation Street actor Nicola Thorp who was stalked online by someone who set up almost 30 social media accounts to send her violent and threatening messages. Phillips said:

This was a case raised by Nicola Thorp, where somebody had been stalking her over multiple identities online, and when they said the police told her that they’d found out who it was, they then told her that they couldn’t tell her who it was.

And so everybody became her stalker – the person she was sat next to on the street – and already, when you’re living through something as harrowing as somebody stalking you and making you feel frightened and anxious, the idea that then you have to distrust all of the people around you as well just seems like a terrible added burden … and so that is what we’re going to eliminate.

I will post more on the package of measures shortly.

Otherwise, it’s a mixed, but busyish day. Here is the agenda.

Morning: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

10.50am: Starmer meets Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, in Downing Street.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, takes questions in the Commons. She is expected to confirm the appointment of Tom Hayhoe, a former Conservative cabinet adviser, as her Covid corruption commissioner.

After 12.30pm: MPs debate the bill implementing the increase in employers’ national insurance announced in the budget.

2.30pm: Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions, gives evidence to the Commons justice committee.

4.45pm: Reeves gives a speech and takes part in a Q&A at the Yorkshire Post’s Great Northern conference.

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