My Lords, I too read Dr Natalie Byrom’s compelling piece. I very much took to heart the points made by my noble friend Lord Bach. He said that the police count crimes, the CPS counts defendants, the courts count cases, but nobody counts the victims.
I was interested in the reference by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to using NHS numbers so that you are not constantly duplicating numbers. I was reflecting
on this because in another life I have dealt with large amounts of data as an engineer. I am very conscious that putting in more identifying numbers does not necessarily make situations more straightforward. Nevertheless, it is a good idea and worth exploring further.
A couple of questions occurred to me during my noble friend’s speech and other contributions. How would you record out-of-court disposals? How would you record withdrawals from cases where there may have been a crime committed but not necessarily a victim identified? Also, what would happen when you got cases of a relatively low nature which were across different police forces and were not necessarily picked up? That is often a source of problems.
The context of this debate is stalkers and domestic abuse, but of course it goes wider, because we were talking in earlier groups about anti-social behaviour and where repeated examples of it were not picked up and acted on. It is a good idea and one that is worth looking at further, but I do not underestimate the complexities of putting it in place.
4.45 pm