Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the effect of the mandatory reporting duty for female genital mutilation on access to healthcare.

The decision by a patient to disclose female genital mutilation (FGM) to a healthcare professional is complex. The FGM Mandatory Reporting duty (which applies only when the patient is under 18) is just one aspect of this.

The Home Office amended the police Annual Data Requirement (ADR) to allow police forces the opportunity from April 2018 to record, on a voluntary basis, offences of FGM which were initially reported to the police under the FGM Mandatory Reporting Duty. Subject to data quality checks, we expect the first dataset under this new voluntary ADR collection to be published later this year. From April 2019, recording of this data under the ADR is mandatory.

With this information in combination with the FGM Enhanced Dataset, published by NHS Digital, we will be able to consider whether there is evidence of impact of the FGM Mandatory Reporting duty.