My Lords, I give my strong support to Amendment 137 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, and I want to congratulate her on her comprehensive and extremely powerful presentation of the arguments in favour of these amendments. Of course, I wholeheartedly agree with every word that she spoke. I also want to thank our Ministers for their support for this amendment, and indeed thank the Home Secretary and Justice Secretary, both of whom, I understand, support the amendment. I thank too all those who have provided briefings for us, in particular Julia Drown, who has been absolute stalwart in support of our work on this issue.
I understand that the Government have accepted the principle of the amendment and agree that it should have general application rather than be limited to cases of domestic abuse; that is, between couples who are personally connected, albeit that the amendment should stand within the Domestic Abuse Bill. That is what I understand, and no doubt the Minister will update us on developments in the work of the Government’s lawyers, who I believe are drafting an amendment that would work in practice. It would be helpful if he could confirm that the Government support the broader amendment but also that it must be included in this Bill for the reasons already given. I do not want to repeat them.
In the circumstances, I want to keep my remarks extremely brief and will just spell out the key reasons why I feel so strongly that the amendment should be agreed. First, women who are victims of non-fatal strangulation are seven times more likely to be killed subsequently. If there is anything that we should do, surely it is to prevent murder.
Secondly, the fact is that these very serious crimes are not being dealt with effectively by our criminal justice system simply because of the peculiarity that there might not be much to observe in the way of immediate symptoms, while the medium or long-term consequences, both mental and physical, of this heinous and horrendous crime are extremely serious. Again, all that has been outlined by other speakers, so I will not repeat it.
I have a lot of sympathy for the police, who do not—of course, they cannot—handle this very well. There needs to be a very specific, stand-alone offence that they can grapple with and understand. The police are overloaded—they are very busy, as I know well from my work with the Police Complaints Authority some years ago—so all my sympathies go to them. For the police, as well as for the victims, we need to get this amendment on the statute book.
Thirdly, this is a particularly horrible way to be assaulted. The idea that it is not dealt with effectively and that people are not punished for doing it is completely unacceptable, so I say again that I very strongly support the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, and her amendments.