Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I know that there is an advisory time limit of five minutes but this Bill raises very significant issues, so I hope that noble Lords will allow me a little more time than that. I thought that my noble friend the Whip on the Front Bench would like early notice of that.

I believe that we should apply stringent tests to any new legislation, particularly when criminal offences are created. There needs to be clear evidence of a problem, legislation has to be necessary to deal with it, the drafting must be clear and unambiguous, and the new law must avoid other harms. I believe that the Bill does not pass any of these tests, but I will concentrate my remarks on only the first test: namely, the evidence base for the Bill.

The Government have certainly tried to be evidence-based in their LGBT policies. In 2015, they commissioned an evidence review by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which said that

“the evidence base for an effective assessment of inequality and relative disadvantage by sexual orientation and gender identity is deficient and has major gaps”.

The Government then organised the National LGBT Survey in 2017, which got a lot of responses. The survey found that a very small proportion, 5%, had been offered conversion therapy and that an even smaller proportion, 2%, had actually undergone it. The respondents were a self-selected sample, which has obvious problems, and the survey did not define what conversion therapy was—a problem that we continue to face with this Bill—nor did it define what constituted being “offered” conversion therapy. The best that we can say about this survey is that it is interesting.

In 2021, the Government published three more studies. One tried to correct for some of the problems with the LGBT survey by weighting some of the data. It could not, of course, correct for the underlying problems of the survey, and so we might conclude that this study too is at best interesting.

The Government commissioned Coventry University to conduct a research review and a qualitative study. It reviewed 46 pieces of research in order to determine what forms conversion therapy takes and who experiences it. The vast majority of these pieces of research were North American studies, and only two came from the UK. If you go into the report’s annexes, you find the problems that Coventry University identified with most of the research that it reviewed. This included a lack of randomised controlled trials, reliance on retrospective self-reporting, self-selecting samples, and the use of a wide variety of conversion therapy methods without differentiating between them.

What did this research survey find? Not very much. The much-trumpeted finding is that there is no evidence that conversion therapy is effective at changing sexual orientation or gender identity. This is not relevant to the Bill. We do not ban something because it does not work unless it is itself harmful—to which I will return. The review found that no studies dealt with effectiveness in the context of gender identity, hence its conclusion—that there is no evidence to show that conversion therapy does not change gender identity—is best ignored.

The report also says that there is

“an increasing amount of quantitative evidence that exposure to conversion therapy is statistically associated with poor mental health outcomes”.

That sounds important, but the report explicitly found no causal connection between the two. This issue of causation is important, because there is considerable evidence that LGBT people in general have poorer than average mental health, and no attempt has been made anywhere to identify the impact of this.

The qualitative study was undertaken to identify the outcomes of conversion therapy. Coventry University interviewed just 30 people, including six who identified as transgender or non-binary, of whom three said that they had been offered conversion therapy. More than two-thirds of this sample said that they were Christians and 93% were white, and so the sample is both tiny and demographically challenged. From this base, the report highlights self-reported harms from conversion therapy. However, the detailed findings contain a somewhat grudging concession that one-third reported benefits from conversion therapy. So there we have it. From a rather flimsy research base, there is no evidence that conversion therapy actually causes harms, and while there are some reported harms from the tiny sample of 30, there are also reports of benefits.

Lastly, the Government Equalities Office produced a report which supplemented the Coventry research and concentrated on the differences between conversion therapies aimed at sexual orientation and those aimed at gender identity. This adds nothing of substance to the other studies. The small print records that there is next to no evidence on gender identity conversion therapy other than in relation to self-reported harms.

I must also refer to the findings of a survey carried out by the Ozanne Foundation in 2020; I anticipate that some noble Lords might refer to it. It reported some startling findings, including that conversion therapies had included beatings and rape, which are of course already criminal offences. Freedom of information requests to police forces have unearthed not a single documented case of violent conversion therapy in the past five years. Like other reports, it suffered from many methodological problems, including self-selection, incomplete reporting and retrospective reporting. It was demographically unrepresentative and quite simply does not constitute robust evidence.

I do not believe that there is a sound evidence base for the existence of a conversion therapy problem, let alone the harms that might be associated with it. The fact that LGBT lobbyists assert that there is a problem does not constitute evidence on which responsible legislators can rely. I know that, if the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, seeks to progress this Bill into Committee, many noble Lords, not all of whom are due to speak today, will want to engage closely in that process.