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

Chris Green Excerpts

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) and his insight into this severe problem and the historical context of the evils from so many years ago still being visited on children and women to this very day.

So many of the points that I would have made have already been made and I am conscious of the limitation on time. I send my appreciations to the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) for her insight into this problem and the points that she made, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) for his insight into the French system, which is very different from the one in the UK. It is perhaps not right that we look to the French when thinking about what system to adopt in the United Kingdom.

It is a significant problem that FGM was first made a criminal offence in the United Kingdom in 1985 but to date there has been only one successful prosecution. I understand that there have been three unsuccessful prosecutions in the UK. Successful prosecutions, and significant sentences to go with them, would form a deterrent. That would contribute to deterring people from engaging with and supporting FGM. We are right to have a zero-tolerance attitude to FGM and I welcome this amendment to the 1989 Act, but will my hon. and learned Friend the Minister say what more can be done to deliver a zero-tolerance approach to FGM?