JANET Anderson's bill to make stalking a criminal offence was today being resurrected in the House of Lords after the government's attempts to kill it in the Commons on Friday.

The Rossendale and Darwen MP was furious after ministers prevented her bill, which would protect thousands of people from harassment, making any further progress in the Commons on Friday.

But Labour's home affairs spokesman in the Lords, Lord Andrew McIntosh, threw the Bill a lifeline this afternoon when he moved its first reading in the House of Lords, which means it is virtually guaranteed a second reading after the Whitsun recess.

This will mean it will certainly get a committee stage. The latest move puts the government seriously on the spot and could expose whether its claims that Mrs Anderson's bill is "seriously flawed" were true or not. Home Secretary Michael Howard and his Minister of State David Maclean said Mrs Anderson's bill was too widely drawn and could bring in legitimate activities into its scope of criminalisation, including the activities of investigative journalists.

Mrs Anderson said any such problems could have been sorted out if it had been given a second reading in the Commons on Friday and gone into committee. However, Tory whip Michael Bates objected and the bill fell in the Commons.

If it gets through the Lords it would go to the Commons, leaving the government with the problem of how to stop it, and Mrs Anderson and Shadow Home Secretary and Blackburn MP Jack Straw are determined to force it to a vote if this is the case.

Then the government would be required to actually vote down the bill that has been amended and passed by the Lords.

Mrs Anderson and Mr Straw believe this could prove their case that Mr Howard and Mr Maclean only vetoed her bill in the Commons for political reasons. They claim that the Tories did not wish to see a Labour bill tackle the problem of stalking and wanted to bring forward their own instead.

Mr Howard has said that because the bill is flawed he will bring his own legislation through as soon as possible.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.