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

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by addressing one of the claims made in support of a new law on conversion therapy. I hear regularly that Conservatives must support a Bill like this in order to keep our manifesto promise, but in fact a conversion therapy law was not part of any party’s manifesto at the last election. Forbes magazine’s LGBT correspondent decried that state of affairs in 2019, saying:

“None of the major U.K. parties has listed a ban on LGBT+ conversion therapy as a manifesto policy”.


The public have never voted for a law like this and we are not bound by any manifestos to support this or any other Bill.

We know that horrendous things happened to gay people in the past, but we can be thankful for good legislation that protects gay and trans people from abuse and coercion. But the impression given by those pressing for this law is that gay and trans people are being abused in their thousands by churches and therapists and that there is nothing the law can do about it. If a gay or trans person goes to a therapist or a church and they feel that they have been abused, they should report it to the police. If what they heard breaches the existing law, the CPS can prosecute. Of course, if it does not breach the existing law, that means that whatever was said to them was not abusive. They might have had an unpleasant experience, but you cannot criminalise unpleasantness. People have choice and agency. Groups such as Stonewall have calculated that a new conversion therapy law is their best shot at silencing dissent. They have realised that a law that prohibits people from suppressing trans identities is effectively self-ID by stealth, because anyone who disputes someone’s trans identity could find themselves having to answer to the police and the criminal courts.

If you read the details of these self-selecting surveys carefully, a different picture emerges. Many of the people reporting conversion therapy had merely prayed alone that God would change them. Is that what we want to criminalise? Do they expect people to turn themselves in to the police for praying for themselves? There is a great woolliness in the discussions about banning conversion therapy, which are emotive and often based on anecdote, but that does not provide a basis for legislation. Reference has been made to the national LGBT survey under the May Administration, but what needs to be noted is that that survey forgot to define what conversion therapy is, forgot to ask whether the experience was historic or recent and forgot to ask whether it took place in the UK or overseas. Legislating for something that we cannot define and cannot even prove exists is dangerous and cuts across the European convention rights in Articles 9, 10 and 11. It will inevitably mean trampling over the rights of innocent people.

Reference has been made to the Scottish Government, who have spent two years working on a 12-clause Bill for consultation. The public perception has been disastrous, with front-page banner headlines about parents of gender-distressed kids facing seven years in jail for not going along with their transition. That Government introduced a broad law that required the statutory equality body to produce guidance on the law. That guidance says that

“not affirming someone’s gender identity”

can count as conversion therapy and it is said to be illegal for parents to refuse to support their children receiving puberty blockers. Is this the sort of law that your Lordships want to impose on the population here? It is a law that takes children from their loving parents for helping them feel comfortable in their own skin and that rewrites mainstream religious belief. If noble Lords think, “That’s okay. We would never have a law like that here”, look at the law in Victoria, which is the template Stonewall legislation. There are no safeguards in the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, and the fines are unlimited.

There are two options, which can be summed up by the approaches of the Netherlands and Sweden. In both countries, legal assessments were carried out to see whether a law on conversion therapy was needed. In both cases, the assessment found that abusive practices were already illegal. Both said that sending a signal is not a good enough reason to legislate.

In the Netherlands, politicians have decided to press ahead anyway; they say they want a new law for situations where “no abuse takes place”—but at least they are honest. In Sweden, on the other hand, it looks as though the Government may do the sensible thing and drop the plan.

Finally, the Bill as drafted is a dangerous attack on civil liberties, on religious freedom and parental and wider human rights; it is socially divisive and unnecessary. Noble Lords must at the very least amend it and, preferably, reject it.