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

Maria Miller Excerpts

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

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I am proud to take part in this debate today. I would like to commend not only Lord Berkeley in the other place and my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) for the work that they are doing, but the Government for realising that legislation in this place can be improved and that FGM has absolutely no place in society. We have a great deal of legislation in place at the moment to try to prevent FGM, but it is not working as well as it should. I am proud to take part in a debate where that is acknowledged. I am proud, too, that we are supporting those who, clearly, have done a huge amount of work to identify ways in which we can improve the legislation on our statute books. Making existing legislation more effective by enabling care orders to be issued in connection with girls who are at risk of FGM will help to save some girls. It will also help to outlaw this abhorrent practice in some communities. As hon. Members said earlier in this debate, the number of Members who are here this evening shows the strength of feeling on this issue across the House.

The Bill in front of us today comes at a timely point, following as it does the first conviction in the UK for female genital mutilation. I applaud the Government for being so gracious with their support for this Bill. I am sure the Minister will come on to talk about that later. FGM has been illegal in the UK since the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985, which was then replaced by the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, and extended by the Serious Crime Act 2015. Successive Governments of all colours have wanted to try to act on this issue, but today’s Bill shows that we have not gone far enough and that we do need to go further, and I hope that it enjoys wholehearted support across the House.

If we are to have really effective legislation, then as legislators we should acknowledge that law alone is not enough and that there is a much broader context: how society views these issues; how our schools deal with things such as relationships and sex education; and how the Government put this issue into a much broader strategy on violence against women and girls. We should be encouraged by the current situation where, as has been said, we have not only relationships and sex education, but, for the first time in more than a decade and a half, guidance on how an issue such as female genital mutilation should be dealt with in our schools. The small point I would make is that it is not enough to have guidance and to make it mandatory that schools deal with the issue; we have to make sure that it is being implemented in practice on the ground.

These are not easy issues for schools to deal with, and sometimes they can get the wrong message from this place—for example, that schools can allow parents to withdraw their children from such lessons. That is a “get out of jail free” card in communities where these issues are difficult, and we cannot send that message out from this debate today. We must not only encourage schools to engage with parents on the issue of FGM, but ensure that they are doing so. It is important that schools ensure that parents do not withdraw their children from relationships and sex education. We need to do all we can to ensure that schools see their responsibility in this area. It is, of course, right that we not only give parents the respect that they deserve in terms of their views on relationships and sex education, but respect the rights of children to get the education that they need to live in a modern society, and that must include understanding the appalling impact that FGM can have on women’s lives.

[James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) on opening this Third Reading debate. I have just come from a meeting in the Boothroyd Room of Sierra Leonean women who are discussing their attempts to eradicate FGM in Sierra Leone. The First Lady has recently sent rather mixed messages about FGM and has relied on cultural practice as a part justification. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we need to send out a very clear message that religious and cultural sensitivities cannot and must not be used as a shield to hide behind when practices such as this are being discussed either in school or in this place?

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that point. We should not allow anybody to hide behind religious or cultural practices when it comes to relationships and sex education. Every child in this country deserves to understand how these issues affect them, and the Government are absolutely right to have made it mandatory for children to attend relationships and sex education. It is particularly important that relationships education has been made mandatory among primary school aged children; it is only by teaching children what a good relationship looks like that we can hope to be able to give them the wherewithal to tackle the online world in which they live. That is a very important enabler that the Government need to ensure is in place. It is not enough for them simply to pass this Bill today, to put it on to the legislative books. They need to ensure that parents are engaging with it and that teachers are confident about the issues so that they can talk to parents.

It is also incredibly reassuring that the Government are looking at this issue as part of their wider cohesive strategy on violence against women and girls that crosses Government Departments. On the Women and Equalities Committee, we do not always encounter cross-departmental strategies on issues to do with discrimination. We have been extremely impressed with the commitment of the Government to have not only a strategy in this area, but a refresh of the strategy on a regular basis, which I was pleased to see will also happen when it comes to sex and relationships education as well. If we are to make this particular piece of legislation work as it should, it needs to be seen alongside the other issues that are covered in the violence against women and girls strategy—issues such as the link between pornography and violence against women, online abuse, and the impact of alcohol on violence against women. The Government are right to have this sort of comprehensive strategy in place. Again, I think they will find extremely strong support from all parts of the House for their very collaborative and cohesive approach.

[Eddie Hughes]

rose—

[Mrs Miller]

I give way to my hon. Friend and fellow Select Committee member.

[Eddie Hughes]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way, not least because the purpose of my rising was to commend her for the excellent work that she has done. This piece of legislation is part of a jigsaw that plays into how the Government have served to deal with violence against women and the equalities agenda more generally in society. These are very valuable pieces of work that she and her Committee have done, and I just wanted to commend her for that work.

[Mrs Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for doing that. He is right to say that it is a jigsaw of issues that must fit together. I see Members sitting on the Front Bench from three different Departments, working seamlessly together on these issues. This Government have a lot to be commended for, especially with regard to the cross-departmental working on these issues, to the way in which they have characterised these sorts of acts against women as cowardly acts, and to making sure that the right support is in place for victims and for bringing perpetrators to justice.

In any of those issues—I am sure that those Ministers sitting on the Front Bench will be very aware of this—there is a need to have support in place, as the pressure that additional legislation brings, particularly on our colleagues in local government, cannot be ignored. I am particularly grateful to the Government for making sure that additional resources will be available to local authorities to deal with any extra pressures that this amendment to legislation imposes. When it comes to issues to do with children, where pressures are already acute, we cannot expect local authorities to be effective unless they have the resources to put the necessary support in place.

[Sarah Champion]

I completely agree with the right hon. Lady on the need for additional resources for local authorities. Does she share my concern that the National FGM Centre—a collaboration between Barnardo’s and the Local Government Association—is having its Government funding stopped in 2020, especially given that it is the main resource that local authorities are using at the moment?

[Mrs Miller]

The hon. Lady raises an important point about specialist provision and resources. I hope that the Ministers on the Front Bench will take that point away and consider how we can ensure that very specialist resources are available to local authorities, because it will be difficult for them to have that sort of expertise in-house. The hon. Lady makes an extremely valuable point, as somebody who has campaigned vigorously and with incredible compassion on these issues.

I want to underline the important role of the Department for International Development, which other Members have referred to in interventions. We should be proud that our country is the first country to have a dedicated anti-FGM programme, working across the globe. It is important for the House to underline that the Department has supported 8,000 communities to abandon, or campaign to abandon, FGM.

The Government have supported the Girl Generation programme—the largest ever global work on the issue, with over 900 organisations working to end FGM. The work that is happening outside the UK is not only important for women in those countries, although that would be justification enough to do the work; it is also invaluable in underlining the human rights of those women in their own countries. Last but by no means least, this work helps to change attitudes that can still influence communities in the UK. The importance of DFID’s work has to be acknowledged. Those who may be naysayers about our contribution to this global world should reflect a little on their views when they consider how this work can so enormously change the lives of millions of women across the world.

This is not a debate in which we will be thinking about internal processes too much, but it would not be right not to point out at least that the reason that we are here today is because of our private Members’ Bills system, whereby an individual Member—quite unrepresentative of the majority feeling of the House—can block a Bill. This is not just a Bill that will do something very small and day to day; it is so important to women’s lives. The whole House has to acknowledge that the need for reform of our private Members’ Bills system is long overdue, and we need to find a way of giving priority to that reform of this place. If we do not, we continue to run the risk of this House being brought into disrepute by individual Members exercising what might be a very principled point of view on the procedure of this place—although I am not sure that this particular objection was as principled as that. We need to acknowledge that this place can look prehistoric from the outside. If we are going to regain the trust of people in Parliament, this sort of reform has to be given priority at some point in the parliamentary calendar.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I could not agree more strongly with my right hon. Friend on the need to reform the process. Does she agree that this kind of small, technical amendment—which is effectively what this Bill is—is exactly where the PMB comes into its own, because there is no natural legislative hook on which the Government can hang it?

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we are going to have a Parliament that works correctly, not just in a post-Brexit world—which is probably more of a challenge than we are thinking about at the moment—but in a modern, transparent and media-literate world, we have to look carefully at the way in which our systems work to enable Members to make such small but important changes in a timely manner, without the need to go through the parliamentary procedures that this Bill has had to go through simply because of the views of one individual.

I very much wish this Bill well. It is a great example of making good legislation even more effective. It will amend the Children Act 1989 to make female genital mutilation protection orders available, and to ensure that we can protect more children who find themselves in a situation where the adults around them may not have their best interests at heart, and who may be at risk of this appalling practice. This Bill should receive support from every single Member in the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Champion]

I have heard of it but not visited. However, that is two centres for an estimated 160,000 women and girls. We need to have more and it needs to be statutory.

When we talk about prosecutions and mandatory reporting, the crime has already been committed and the damage, both physical and psychological, has already been done. We need to be doing much more about prevention. I would like to speak in support of the National FGM Centre, which is a collaboration between Barnardo’s and the Local Government Association. It receives funding from the Home Office, the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care. None of those Departments is continuing its funding beyond 2020 because it is deemed that the centre ought to be generating its own income. I understand that. However, its main support services go via local authorities, which are already suffering under huge cuts and do not have additional resources to start buying in specialist support for FGM.

The National FGM Centre does great work. It embeds FGM specialist social workers within multidisciplinary safeguarding teams. It works from the bottom up, empowering communities to tackle this crime themselves and to get the word out that it is a crime and it should not be happening. The centre also does amazing training for professionals and provides a knowledge hub so that all local authorities can share the information. With the best will in the world, if the funding stops, the prevention work will stop with it.

[Mrs Miller]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. We agreed earlier that it is important for local authorities to have the funding, but I am not sure whether I agree that we should not encourage local authorities to take on this responsibility, because surely getting them to prioritise funding of facilities such as the one she mentioned is a great way to try to raise their awareness of this issue.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We have 13 Members waiting to speak, and the Minister needs to wind up the debate. I do not want someone to miss out on the opportunity to make a speech. Can we all look after each other in this important debate?