Women, Peace and Security Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Friday 15th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, the admirable Bill from the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, covers not just violence to women and girls in conflict areas but also more generally, so I hope she will forgive me if I digress slightly from areas of conflict to matters in the home and abroad and to the continued and horrific practice of female genital mutilation.

I was first made aware of this shortly after joining your Lordships’ House in 2013, when the novelist Ruth Rendell—the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell of Babergh—campaigned over the practice in this country. I was utterly shocked to discover that, in the UK, girls were being subjected to this torture, often with a rusty razor blade, leading to endless health issues for the rest of the victim’s life, including infertility, infection, fistulas, pain and sexual problems.

Now, there has been some improvement in this country, according to my friend Nimco Ali, the campaigner who has undergone FGM, and the real challenge probably lies in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular Somalia and its neighbours. Here, education is probably our best and most important strategy.

However, despite some welcome news on the home front, I want to warn against complacency. Because we do not read about it, it does not mean that it is not happening here. That is a reason for ongoing concern. I will give noble Lords some NHS figures, but first, a plea from the Five Foundation to the Government. In 2014, the Home Office funded a study to find the prevalence of FGM here, based on the 2011 census and other research. It showed that 137,000 women and girls were affected and that no local authority in England and Wales was free from FGM. With new census information now available from 2022, will the Home Office agree to a request by the Five Foundation, which Nimco Ali heads, to work with it to update these prevalence estimates? This project would help to inform policy on ending FGM in the UK, including to potentially help signpost where survivors could get help medical or psychological support. It would help identify the areas where FGM is prevalent.

The latest statistics from the NHS are shocking, even though they are down:

“There were 2,090 individual women and girls who had an attendance where FGM was identified in the period January 2024 to March 2024. These accounted for 3,900 attendances reported at NHS trusts and GP practices where FGM was identified. There were 945 newly recorded women and girls in the period January 2024 to March 2024. Newly recorded means that this is the first time they have appeared in this dataset … The number of newly recorded women and girls has reduced over time. This is to be expected as the longer the collection continues, the greater the chance of a woman or girl having been recorded in it previously. Since April 2015, 37,525 individual women and girls had an attendance where FGM was identified”.


So, by any measure, we simply must not sit back. We must continue to pursue anyone committing and facilitating FGM, and continue to make the practice unacceptable in communities where it happens, through discussion and education. I hope that the new Government will endorse these sentiments.