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

Lord Altrincham Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Altrincham (Con)]

My Lords, this Bill comes at a time of very wide distress among young people. The NHS reports that 25% of 17 to 19 year-olds are experiencing significant mental health problems. Even if we adjust that and imagine that it is quite a bit of ordinary human unhappiness, there is great distress at the moment. We should be careful to protect services that help those young people. They are presenting with a wide range of mental health concerns. That is across the whole spectrum, but it is particularly true at the end of the spectrum that this Bill is focused on. In the Cass review, it was noted that 70% of young people presenting had more than five different forms of mental health problems, such as trauma and depression. The sheer complexity of these mental health concerns only adds to the importance of talking therapy and protecting psychiatric services in the country.

This is against a backdrop in which the use of drugs is increasing tremendously—we heard about this in our House of Lords inquiry last year into the integration of primary and community care. Far too many drugs are being prescribed to all age groups, including young people, and they are being prescribed because there are insufficient mental health services and insufficient other ways of looking after people. Drugs are not the way forward; talking therapies are all we have got. We might be careful about limiting talking therapies in any way, particularly for the very small group that is the subject of this Bill. If there is harm in this Bill, the first harm is that they themselves might find a limitation in access to talking therapies; they might find that the therapists available to them have moved sideways or elsewhere. The Bill obviously criminalises discussion and activities to an extraordinary extent. Only in England would a conversation with pronouns at one end and puberty blockers at the other have a policeman somewhere in the middle, trying to give expression to Clause 1. It is an extraordinary intervention into public health.

More broadly than this group, we cannot afford any reduction in mental health services for young people. We cannot, at this point, restrict these services at all; we are in no position to do that. There are, at best, 11,000 psychiatrists working in public health in this country, across all age groups, of which maybe only a few thousand are dealing with young people. Only a small change in that number downwards would increase the distress of tens of thousands of young people and their families. It is an extraordinarily sensitive area for us to wander into with criminal justice.

In summary, this Bill is in conflict with mental health services and provision in the country. It seeks to bring criminal justice and politics into the most sensitive area of public health and mental health, to the detriment of young people.