Children Act 1989 (Amendment) (Female Genital Mutilation) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park and Chris Green

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 11th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention and I agree with it, as this is a cross-cutting issue. A colleague suggested earlier that this should form part of personal, social, health and economic education in this country, which it now will, but it is a Home Office issue and a health issue, too. It covers a lot of different Departments. If there is anything at all that I or the all-party group and my colleagues on it can do to help in the case the hon. Lady has just raised, we are at her service and will do what we can.

Despite the laws we have in place and the injection of funds to campaigning on this issue around the world, clearly there are gaps in the law and the problem has not gone away. In 2016-17, the NHS reported 9,179 cases of FGM, of which 5,391 were newly recorded cases. As hon. Members will know, there has been only one successful prosecution for FGM, after numerous failed attempts; this came to an end last week with a 37-year-old woman being sentenced to 11 years.

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend look to the record in France, the approach the French take in dealing with FGM and their success as a source of ideas that we could follow to help cut down on FGM in the UK?

[Zac Goldsmith]

We have looked at that in the all-party group. The French engage in a much more interventionist approach, with, for example, inspections of young girls. Most of the people who have given evidence to our group feel that it would not fit this country; they feel it would be stepping over a line. However, another area where the French have been more robust than we have in this country has been in trying to identify people at risk. Certain people are at risk and others are not. Where someone has not been subjected to FGM and their parents were not either, the likelihood of their going on to subject their own child to it is very small, although it is not zero. In other families where it passes from generation to generation, a newborn girl clearly is at risk. The French are much more robust than we have been in this country on that.