Civil Partnership Act 2004 (Amendment) (Sibling Couples) Bill [HL]

Baroness Barker Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 20th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure this morning to put on record my admiration for the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. I do not know him particularly well, but over the years I have watched the many things that he has done, particularly within his own political party, to secure greater equality for LGBT people. I admire much that he has done. It will surprise nobody, least of all him, that today I profoundly disagree with him, but I hope we will continue in future to be allies on other matters.

I disagree with him today because I believe that this proposal has a fundamental and dangerous flaw. I accept that, back in 2004, the people who proposed extending civil partnerships in this way did so to wreck the then Civil Partnership Bill, and they very nearly succeeded. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, very nearly succeeded in doing so. I also accept that today that is not the motivation of the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. None the less, I believe that the path he has chosen to pursue is wrong. In 2004, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, took her lead from the Christian Institute, one of the first organisations to import into this country a rather brutal form of evangelical Christianity from the United States. I think noble Lords will find it worth reading the documents which the institute produced at that time to see the fundamental underlying motivation for the proposal.

It is wrong to equate the relationship between siblings and family members with relationships between adults which are entered into voluntarily as loving relationships. It is simply wrong. Consanguinity is not something that we can ignore in this matter because it has a profound effect upon relationships. I shall pick up one point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden. He talked about equalising the relationship of siblings with people who have particular lifestyles they have chosen. Being gay is not a lifestyle and, for some of us, it is not a choice. We are who we are and our relationships as gay people are fundamentally different from the relationships that we have with our siblings. The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, and many other noble Lords made the point that the purpose of the Bill is to end discrimination or to support siblings—although I noticed how many of your Lordships talked about daughters, and I will come back to that in a moment—supporting their family. The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, is not, I think, proposing that children should enter into civil partnerships with their parents. However, if one accepted the basis of his proposal, one could argue that perhaps they should. I think that that is fundamentally wrong. It conflates two entirely different relationships and complicates them.

Let us get on to the complications. The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has not talked about one particularly important matter: a civil partnership can be dissolved. You cannot dissolve your relationship with your family in the same way. You can become estranged, you can have the most horrible and distant relationship, you can fall out over property, but you will remain in that family. That is why I think the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, was wrong, as was the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, to say that this is a wholly beneficial measure which inflicts no harm on anyone. Imagine yourself in the position of a woman in a family with an overbearing, dominant brother or father and a significant property. Noble Lords have spoken this morning about couples they know. The couple who come to my mind—there were originally three siblings but one of them died; I do not know what we would do in a case where there were more than two siblings, but that is another matter to consider—lived on a farm. They were devoted to each other. They were members of my father’s church and wonderful people. If this proposal had been in place and one of those siblings had wished not to remain on that farm but to go away, imagine the pressure that there would have been on that woman. That is the dark side of this that no one has spoken about: the potential for abuse that it opens up. It is why I have maintained in all the discussions we have had that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is wrong. I can see that carers would come under enormous pressure to enter into a civil partnership. Incidentally, as I have said to her before, I think it is really interesting that no carers’ organisation has ever asked for this and, as far as I know, they do not support it. They support carers having much greater support than they do now but not being tied into a legal obligation such as this. I could not disagree more fundamentally with the noble Baroness. I do not for one moment question her motivation but I disagree with her entirely.

The Bill is fundamentally flawed. The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, talked about the “curious reluctance” of another place to consider this matter. I think it is a wholly understandable decision not to pursue something that is fundamentally flawed and potentially dangerous.

[Baroness Deech]

On a point of order, why would there be more duress on two family members to enter a civil partnership than on any other two people? Of course if there is duress, it is vitiated. Any contract or marriage or civil partnership that you enter into not of your own free will is invalidated. A civil partnership can be ended just like that, even if two people are family members. Given that there is a dissolution procedure, that would apply. There is an academic output, which I do not know if the noble Baroness has seen, that suggests that the pressure for civil partnerships, which is not just about money, between family members is a way of denying the sexuality of gay partnerships. Some 14 years have gone by and I think that argument is simply not tenable.

[Baroness Barker]

Yet again I disagree fundamentally with the noble Baroness; I think that is exactly what it is about. I also say to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, that I am not guilty, and I do not know anyone else within the LGBT community who is, of wanting to keep civil partnerships as the preserve of our community. I support the extension of civil partnerships to heterosexual couples, although that debate is for another day, but extending it to people who as adults come together of their own volition, with no baggage and no pressure, is completely different. The noble Baroness dismisses some of the great tensions of family life in her submission.

I believe the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, is right that the Bill is trying to deal with a matter that should be dealt with by the Treasury because it is about fiscal matters. I would warmly support anyone who wished to find some way of addressing those issues of inheritance tax. However, you do not solve an injustice by putting in place something that is equally unjust and open to great abuse. I genuinely believe that this is a wrong and dangerous move. I hope that, just as 14 years ago, we in this House and people in another place will see this for the great mistake that it is and stop it.

Overseas Aid: Charities and Faith-based Organisations

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, for giving us the opportunity to discuss this topic today. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McNicol, on an excellent maiden speech. I am intrigued to discover that he is a snowboarder because, to the best of my knowledge, he comes from the one part of Scotland where there is very little snow—that is why they built Prestwick Airport where they did. So he is clearly a man of great fortitude who works hard to achieve his goals.

I declare my interest as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Sexual and Reproductive Health, a member of the APPG on Population, Development and Reproductive Health and of the HIV/AIDS group, and a supporter of the NAZ project, a black and minority ethnic organisation dealing with HIV and AIDS, principally in this country but also in other parts of the world.

For those reasons, I listened to the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, with great interest. Faith-based health providers are a major component of health service delivery in many developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The WHO estimates that at least 40% of healthcare services in sub-Saharan Africa are provided by the faith-based sector, and that between 30% and 70% of health infrastructure in Africa is owned by faith-based organisations. So it is clear that faith-based organisations are going to be a very important part of the delivery of health. That is not surprising: Christian missionary hospitals and Islamic hospitals were often the first medical facilities throughout Africa. Because of their extensive infrastructure, they are a critical component; they exist where the government sector and the private sector are poorly developed. They are very active in public health initiatives, particularly around HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. They can aid and augment the supply of materials and medicines. They are sometimes the only genuine NGOs, and they are very much trusted and influential in the communities in which they work.

At the same time, some faith-based providers of services have very narrow, conservative interpretations of their faith that can have a direct effect on very important matters such as access to family planning, contraception, abortion and HIV/AIDS treatment, particularly condom distribution and condom use. That has very obvious consequences for women and girls. It is therefore only right that we look at that issue in some detail today, because it is critical not only to the lives of the people but to government organisations that are trying to work in a complicated landscape of providers.

For many faith-based organisations, the provision of healthcare services is an important part of their mission, and those faiths live out their values within their service provision. That is absolutely understandable, but, within different religions and at different levels of religious organisations, there is often quite a variation in understanding of what their practice is and should be. At its heart, the Catholic Church has very clear policies, particularly about access to contraception and abortion. In other religions, it is less clear. For example, there is a debate raging about whether intrauterine devices are abortifacients. That can have a major impact on a population of women and girls.

It is an issue that people in the aid sector return to time and time again. Nobody doubts that religious organisations can be of major importance in the development of the health, wealth and economy of a nation, but, as public policy, and in particular local political public policy, is often heavily influenced by external religious funding sources, it can sometimes bring about a great change. It is interesting that we are discussing this today when the President of the United States of America is in town. His Government came in and reintroduced what is known as the global gag rule. If fact, they extended a previous US Government policy to deny funding to any organisation that they deemed to be a provider of abortion services. That is having a huge impact across the world. Not only does it affect those services that provide safe abortions, it has a direct impact on services that provide access to family planning and contraception, which may not necessarily provide abortion services but are caught under that rule. That in turn has a knock-on effect on the general health systems of, in particular, low-income and middle-income countries.

As ever, the Minister will not be surprised that I ask: how is DfID, as one of the leading providers of funding for contraceptive services and access to safe abortion—because our Government recognise that it is one of the key interventions that can be made to affect the economic outlook of not just women and girls but of the country—going to calibrate the distribution of moneys? DfID has not had a change in policy, but it now has to operate within a landscape in which other major funders, chiefly those of the United States, have changed.

Back in 2011, a report was produced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health. It was called, Sex, Ideology, Religion: 10 Myths about World Population Growth and produced by Richard Ottaway, the then Conservative MP, and was a riveting read for any of us interested in this field. He made the important point that most of the tenets of major religions were devised well before many of today’s issues, such as the changing technology of reproductive health and contraception, climate change and access to water and food, were the emergencies that they now are in certain parts of the world. Therefore, their consequences are somewhat different. He rightly says that all religions have a belief that family planning is a good thing and permissible. What is questionable, and where they differ, is on how that may be achieved. For some, we know that access to contraception remains a taboo: for others it is not.

When DfID is in the business of deciding which religious organisations will be part of its strategy for a country, will it ask about and take into account the policy that that religious group and its providers in the field will follow? That is not to weed people out or say that some people may never have any funding; it is about ensuring that the objectives of the programme that we set, which are laudable, for the at-risk populations in those countries are met.

I simply say this. There will always be funding for religious organisations; they will always have a legitimate part to play. But we need to have greater transparency about the nature of their funding alongside that of other people, so that we ensure that key vulnerable populations do not miss out completely on essential health services.

In the brief time available to me, I will mention another small but interesting issue that came to my attention during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. I listened to an Australian senator, Linda Reynolds, who was talking about orphanage tourism. It was a new issue to me, but one that I was interested to hear about. The Australian Government are about to change their laws on trafficking to include orphanages. They are doing that because considerable investigation, not least in places such as Cambodia, has revealed that so-called orphanages operate to standards which make one question them. Children are often there who have not been separated from their family but are there as part of a lure to tourists. It is a way in which desperate people attempt to gain an income.

The Australian Government are not only going to change their law to try to clamp down on orphanage tourism, they are promoting a smart volunteering scheme. It is often generous-hearted young people, often with the backing of their community here at home, who volunteer and form short-term attachments to children. We in the West now know that putting children in institutions is to condemn them to just about the most awful health and life outcomes and we tend not to do it. We tend as far as possible to support children in any setting other than an institution.

It is perhaps time that we began to look internationally at some of this. I am not suggesting that right at this moment we change our laws, but I ask the Minister whether he and his department might ask their counterparts in Australia what they are doing, why, and what we might learn from them.

Faith-based organisations have a very long tradition of helping some of the poorest and most desperate people in the world. In so far as they continue to do that, they deserve our backing, but we must ask increasingly that we have a debate with faith leaders about the exclusivity of some of the policies behind their engagement in this work.

LGBT Action Plan: Gender Recognition

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for his characteristically thoughtful and original introduction to this subject. He will perhaps accept from me my frustration that we have a very short debate and very short amount of time in which to begin to talk about one of the most significant pieces of data gathering in the world on this subject. I could, in my allotted time, simply talk about his comments about children and similarly those of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, because there is much in what they said that needs to be teased about and explained more fully. Sadly, we do not have time to do that today. I hope that the Minister will understand that there are many of us on all sides of the House who wish to be extremely helpful to the Government in bringing this plan to fruition. I hope that, because of this debate, we will not be precluded from debating and discussing all of this further.

As a Liberal Democrat, I am absolutely delighted to see this action plan and this research. Our party has been engaged in campaigning for over 50 years, and it is great to have the first large-scale evidence of many of the things that we have thought for years have been happening. This is a hugely important dataset, but let us be clear: it is not comparative data, and it is self-reported. The one thing I ask the Minister is: will the Government, as soon as possible, release as much of the data as is possible to do without in any way breaching the confidentiality of the respondents and share it with other academics and indeed even people working in the private sector who are perhaps to some extent a bit ahead of government on dealing with this issues? I fear that even the civil servants—although they have done a tremendous job and will continue to do so—will not be able to do full justice to this information.

The one thing that has struck me in this report is that, in my lifetime, public services such as the police and the Armed Forces have changed beyond all recognition, but the one public service that continues to fail the LGBT community is the NHS. Something I am very pleased to see come out of this report is a recognition that LGBT health is not just about gay men’s sexual health nor about gender identity; it is much broader than that. Across the piece, the NHS continues to provide our community with a lamentable service. We have research reports going back to 2005 or 2006, and in 2009 the NHS itself produced a wonderful report on how to deal with LGB patients. Yet it is the one service that everybody in our community has said, or has said in terms, continues to fail them.

I am interested to see that the Government have come up with the idea that there should be an LGBT adviser in the NHS. We have had them before, although perhaps not with as much high-level support as it comes with in this report. But I question whether one person can represent a community as diverse as ours, and whether one person can make some change in the NHS. What we require from the NHS is not another adviser but some people whose responsibility is to bring about fundamental change, and who, if the service remains as awful as it is, will end up losing their jobs. We are taxpayers and we have a right to a service which gives us as good health outcomes as anybody else, and we have been ignored for too long.

I will make one related point. One of the things that I was most pleased to see in the report was a commitment to try to end conversion therapy. There is an agreement across the board that that is wrong. It has been interesting to talk to some of the religious bodies and the professional therapy bodies about how they will try to do that. No mention at all is made of conversion therapy for children. Quite frankly, if it is bad for adults, it is harmful to children. Will the Minister talk about that?

On the mention of the issue of care and social care and that the Government want to work with other organisations to improve them, that is very welcome. I was responsible for the setting up of Opening Doors London, which recently had its first “Pride in Care” conference, trying to talk to hundreds of thousands of providers about the need to deal with the very genuine fears there are, particularly among older people, that if they ever become frail, the dignity and autonomy that they have built for themselves in their own life will not be recognised by the providers of formal care.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, raised some interesting points on the minority communities within our communities. He and I will continue to help the Minister, perhaps behind the scenes for a few months, by giving her some more detail about that.

My noble friend is right: the trans community is under a sustained and vicious attack at the moment. More than ever, the rest of us need to try to understand them better and to give them as much support as we possibly can as they weather a terrible storm of hate.

LGBT Action Plan

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Baroness for her questions. When I first started in my role as Equalities Minister, I did not believe that conversion therapy existed. I thought that the like of what happened to people like Alan Turing was gone, only to find that it still exists. One upshot of the survey is to highlight that it does exist. It exists not just in some of the settings where we think it exists but in all sorts of settings which affect all government departments. In terms of how exactly we are going to end it, we have deliberately not been specific, because it will require a series of both legislative measures and non-legislative measures. The proposals will be outlined in due course.

The national adviser will explore the areas where health inequalities exist for LGBT people in our society and will advise the Government and other providers on those inequalities. In terms of money, we have put in £4.5 million to help us deliver the action plan. On trans abuse, the noble Baroness is absolutely right—trans people appear to be the most unhappy of our LGBT friends in society and to face the worst abuse. This abuse is not just from people in the street; it might be from inappropriate healthcare, in school settings, or in the workplace. We are well aware of trans abuse, and many of these things have been at the forefront of our minds with the refreshed hate action plan, which we will be publishing soon.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this piece of work. I had a chance this morning only to skim the surface of it, but it represents a huge amount of research, and I hope the Government will make that research available to academics and other researchers as quickly as possible, as it is immensely valuable. I will ask the Minister two simple questions. Regarding the NHS post, in discussions with other people this morning when we got the report, the general consensus was that having one person try to represent the whole community would be rather difficult. However, the key issue is the training, knowledge and understanding of staff in the NHS. Who within the NHS will have responsibility for overseeing the change envisaged in this report, which is very badly needed?

Secondly, on conversion therapy, what plans do the Government have to engage faith groups in the work they are planning to undertake? Faith groups are often where these practices are found.

Finally, on inclusive sex and relationship education, I know that the Government are keen for this to come about as it is the key to so many of the issues that have been highlighted. Can the Minister tell us when the Government are likely to bring forward proposals?

Forced Marriage

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I often think that we need a certain degree of humility in this. We have been wrestling with the issue of forced marriage within our own communities here in the UK. There was a significant conviction in Birmingham just a couple of days ago, with someone sentenced to four and a half years in prison. If we engage with people at all levels, both at home and abroad, we can try to give young people the opportunities that we seek for them so that they might realise their full potential.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

Will the NCA be enabled with the resources to spread the intelligence that it has gathered in this country to its counterparts in Commonwealth countries?

[Lord Bates]

I presume that the noble Baroness is referring to the Forced Marriage Unit. That is an interesting point. The unit is situated in the Home Office but works jointly with the Foreign Office. I am not sure whether that happens. I will look into it and perhaps I may respond to the noble Baroness in writing.

Homosexual Activities: Pardons

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

On the issue of the MoD and some historic service offences, we are in discussions with the MoD as well as representatives of the Army, Navy and Air Force to define the criteria to allow these disregards where appropriate. But I share my noble friend’s frustration. It has not been a quick process. We are doing everything that we can to expedite this is quickly as possible and I am keen to work with noble Lords to this end.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

The Minister is absolutely right: it has not been a quick process. In fact, decriminalisation has taken 50 years in this country. Therefore, will the Government put together some recommendations for other countries that are starting out on the process of decriminalisation that would help them bring about the change they want in much less time? In particular, following on from the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, will she engage the military and the police, which have been important actors in the whole process of decriminalisation?

Immigration: Asylum Claims

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Wednesday 28th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

All people in the detention estate have training in dealing with LGBT claims and claims on the grounds of faith. As with LGBT claims, faith claims are dealt with sensitively. Nobody who fears persecution because of their faith or because they are LGBT would be expected to return to a country in which that characteristic was persecuted.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister understand that some of us are greatly concerned when her department has to ask charities and voluntary organisations to tell it how many LGBT people it has in detention? Could her department commit to producing better statistics on these people, who, after all, are often detained with the very people from whom they are fleeing persecution?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I thank the noble Baroness for bringing that up. She will know that we produced statistics at the end of last year. Figures from charities and any information that could be brought to bear in this early stage of making those statistics robust are always helpful, but clearly, we would like to get to a stage where the statistics we produce are robust. I thank the noble Baroness for her part in this.

Domestic Abuse

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

I hope that noble Lords will agree that any person—man or woman—fleeing domestic violence has the right to access secure accommodation in which they feel safe. In the past few months there has been a lot of fevered comment on the status of refuges, and I want to take a moment to ask the Minister to confirm my understanding of the law.

It is the Equality Act 2010, not the Gender Recognition Act 2004, that provides trans people with legal protection from discrimination and addresses access to single-sex services. The Equality Act 2010 provides an exemption for single-sex services, allowing a trans person to be treated differently from other service users provided that that is a proportionate response to achieve a legitimate aim.

Reform of the Gender Recognition Act will not change that exemption. Violence-against-women services already have robust risk management and safeguarding policies in place—for example, to identify and prevent any lesbian perpetrator of violence against a partner gaining access to a women’s-only service. Such services can and do exclude from group work and shared refuge accommodation anyone who is assessed as posing a risk to other service users—for example, due to anti-social behaviour, a criminal history or drug addiction. Possession of a gender recognition certificate would not circumvent in any way those risk management procedures and exclusion would still be possible.

For several years, many UK violence-against-women service providers have allowed trans women to use their services on a self-declaration basis, and no problems have been reported. Does the Minister agree that the review of the Gender Recognition Act should uphold those protections for all people who need domestic violence services?

Incident in Salisbury

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I understand my noble friend’s question and completely appreciate what such an event might lead to, should toxic or noxious substances come in through our major airports. The security and detection arrangements at our airports are stronger than ever before, so I hope she is comforted by that. We assess risk at the border all the time. In fact, my noble friend points to the changing risks at the border—risks that perhaps were not there years ago now are, in terms of the various ways in which people can bring things into this country.

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, returning to the Litvinenko case, many Members of your Lordships’ House, including me, were involved in the updating of the public health laws that we had in this country, some of which dated back to the previous century. Will the Minister, along with her colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care, report to the House in due course whether those legislative changes were sufficient to deal with what seems at this stage to be a somewhat similar incident?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

Certainly, Public Health England worked in conjunction with the police in the immediate aftermath of this event. It is clearly involved in the ongoing recovery of the individuals concerned. I will take that point back and provide an answer for the noble Baroness if I can.

International Women’s Day: Progress on Global Gender Equality

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Pendry. As this past week we have been remembering the wonders of Sir Roger Bannister, who ran the first sub-four-minute mile, I can reveal that I have recently taken up running and I may set the record for the slowest mile. As the noble Lord said, however, even this girl can.

We are having this debate at a significant time, the run-up to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which is very important to some of us. That is because 40 out of 53 Commonwealth states criminalise homosexuality. They account for more than half of the world’s nations where same-sex relations are illegal. Seven Commonwealth nations impose life imprisonment. Some have the death penalty for relationships between men. Hate crimes against LGBT people are most widespread in most Commonwealth countries. The vast majority of LGBT people who live there have no legal protection or rights whatsoever.

This Commonwealth Heads of Government summit, happening as it is in London, is an opportunity for those of us living in this country who, over the past 50 years—a milestone we marked last year—have experienced enormous economic, social and political change and advances, to share with others around the world the secrets of how we have advanced as a nation. Will the Minister consider the work of the All-Party Group on Global LGBT Rights, which is working with an organisation called Open for Business, a collection of top global businesses that have come together and are putting together the economic case against discrimination? We are building a lot of data from well-established resources, such as the World Bank, from which we can show that countries where there is a good attitude towards LGBTI inclusion have better economic performance, are more competitive, have greater levels of entrepreneurship and foreign direct investment, and fare better in global markets. They are also the sorts of countries with less of a brain-drain. That applies to both men and women.

Lesbians are often deemed to be at less risk in these countries because they are often less visible, but in fact they are probably more vulnerable in many ways because they usually have a less economically stable existence. I commend to the noble Baroness the work of a very small charity, Micro Rainbow International, which gives business support and start-up funding to LGBT people so that they can set up businesses. The charity provides a good example of how they are able to help, concerning two women who were harassed and badly treated in their community because they were seen as outsiders. They were given money to start a small bakery and are now respected employers in their community. That is but one example of an approach that could be further adopted. I hope that Ministers attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit will make not only the moral case but also the financial and business case to other leaders in the Commonwealth, because their countries need economic development just as much as ours.

My second point is that I really liked the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, who opened this debate so eloquently and fully. She is very different from the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, who answers my Written Questions. I am very sorry that she is not in her place to hear me say so. She will know that over the past year and a half I have submitted endless questions to her department, principally about the detention of LGBTI asylum seekers. I have still not received a satisfactory answer on why we are busy locking people up in detention at a cost of £36,000 per year when they are no flight risk whatever.

I will, however, give the Minister due credit for the fact that her department, after 18 months, finally got round to releasing some statistics just before Christmas. These show, quite horrifyingly, that two-thirds of people who apply for asylum on the basis of being LGB—not T: we have excluded trans people—fail. Consequently we are sending people back to countries such as Nigeria, Uganda and Sri Lanka where they will face very serious peril: in some cases they will inevitably be sent to prison for an extended period. I asked the noble Baroness a few months ago what efforts were being made by those supervising such deportations to ensure that people would not be imperilled when they go back. Even by the standards of the Home Office, I got a pretty ropey Answer. It seems that we are busy saying that this matter is the responsibility of the country to which people are returned. I do not think that is good enough when people are put in jeopardy as a result.

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, Justine Greening and Mrs May all deserve a lot of congratulations on having the courage to say that they will go ahead with the consultation on the reform of the Gender Recognition Act. That Act is currently not fit for purpose. People who need to rely on it are forced to go through truly humiliating and demeaning experiences to have legal recognition of their identity. Since the Government made that announcement, there has been an absolutely relentless campaign against it, waged primarily by transphobic feminists such as Sarah Ditum and Julie Bindel and Murdoch journalists such as Janice Turner and Andrew Gilligan—along with, I might add, some absolutely woeful journalism on the part of the BBC.

I say to the Government that I would not blame them for being somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of that campaign, but I sincerely hope that they will stand firm—and do so in the knowledge that if they go ahead, as I really believe they should, they will have widespread support from these Benches. I believe the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, might agree that there would be support from the Official Opposition’s Benches, too. We know that, at heart, this work is very necessary to bring about equality for a bunch of people who have a really tough time in our country, and to whom we owe it to bring about legal equality.

In the one minute left to me, I want to very much welcome the publication of the report by the group of the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, which I was part of. Autonomy over your body is the absolute bedrock of your existence as a human being but for us women, of all different types and backgrounds, now more than ever—in the face of some of the terrible stuff coming out of the United States—we must stand together. We must understand each other’s differences and bind together on those basic things that are of immense importance to us all and to the girls of the future.