Thank you very much to Plaid for proposing this debate. I thank Joyce for highlighting the fact that only two stalking orders were granted in the last available set of figures in one year, and I think it makes point (c) and point (e) of the motion particularly important, which I'd like to talk about in relation to one of my constituents, who has been persistently stalked over two or three months, and the police have simply failed to take appropriate action. So, she's had her—. The relationship ended, which she thought had been reasonably amicable, but then she's had persistent reporting to the police of her tyres being slashed, and again and again, pouring paint over the car, ripping off the wing mirrors and the windscreen wipers. This happened on five occasions, and all the police did was to tell her to move her car to somewhere else, and to buy a closed-circuit television camera. So, she had to then get together her hard-earned earnings to buy a CCTV camera, and she did then get the evidence on the CCTV camera of him slashing the car yet again. And the police just go round and say, 'Oh, there's not enough evidence here to take this to the Crown Prosecution Service because we won't get the prosecution we need.' 

Well, we simply have to change the culture on this, because we should know that it's very different from people who do stupid things in the heat of the moment because we're upset. This is persistent and obsessive behaviour that, if it's done to one person, will be done to another person if that person manages to escape their clutches. We all may have seen the programme about Dennis Nilsen. The police failure to act on the Dennis Nilsen murders meant that many more young people were killed than should have been, and, in the case of stalking, obviously, we're not talking about murder at this stage, but how do you know that somebody who's currently a stalker won't go on to do more extreme things because they're going to get more of a kick out of a more extreme action?

So, this is a really serious matter. It has to be taken to court in order to get the courts to force the individual to address their own adverse childhood experience, probably, but at least to understand that that is just not the way to behave. If somebody doesn't want to have a relationship with you any longer, that is the end of the story. If, by failing to do so, we are not putting a halt to this obsessive behaviour, that person is going to go on to do exactly the same thing to lots of other people—anybody else they get into a relationship with and who doesn't want to be in a relationship with them after they realise what a controlling individual that person is.

Obviously, I'm going to be taking this up with the police, but I think it's really important that we do force our police commissioners to take this matter seriously. Of the one in five people we think this happens to, we have two stalking orders. This will just not do, and I think we really do—. We can't just rely on the new curriculum to ensure that young people understand what respectful relationships look like. We absolutely have to ensure that law enforcement is preventing people who have become a danger to the community from taking things even further.