Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department plans to criminalise the practice of gay conversion therapy.

This Government is clear that a person’s sexual orientation is not an illness to be cured and we are not prepared to see such activity continue either in the regulated professional sector or outside of it.

The Government has already taken steps to prevent the practice of gay conversion therapy in the UK. We have worked with the main registration and accreditation bodies for psychotherapy and counselling practitioners to develop a Memorandum of Understanding to put a stop to this bogus treatment.

We do not currently have plans to introduce new criminal offences for practising gay conversion therapy, but we are keeping the issue under close review.

In 2017, the Government Equalities Office carried out a survey of the experience of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the UK, which included several questions about gay conversion therapy. The survey received more than 100,000 responses, making it one of the largest surveys of LGBT people’s experiences ever conducted.

The results of the survey are currently being analysed and the Government’s response will be published later this year. Due to the significant response rate to the survey, we believe this data will give us a much better view of the scale and significance of conversion therapy in the UK, and it will allow us to investigate further the steps that Government as a whole could take to address this issue.