Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [HL]

I support the Government’s amendments, to which I have added my name. At Second Reading on 26 January, the Bill received remarkably widespread support across the House, including support from noble Lords who are present today. At that stage, the Minister—who I congratulate on becoming a Justice Minister—was benignly neutral and open-minded about the Bill. I indicated that it would require co-operation on all sides if we were to see the Bill taken further and translated into practical reality. I am delighted that the Government are now giving wholehearted support to the Bill. A Private Member’s Bill has no real prospect of being translated into law unless it has government support. It has been a great pleasure and a privilege to work with a fine team of civil servants, under the Minister’s energetic direction, to design amendments that are well drafted—in fact brilliantly drafted—and make significant improvements to the original design, which I did in only four pages. I am also delighted that the Bill has the support of the Official Opposition and that the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, is leading for her party on this issue. It is also supported by my party, and it has support that goes well beyond the main political parties. It is very important that the amendments are thoroughly discussed in the context of the probing amendments that have been tabled by the Opposition, which I greatly welcome. As the EOC notes in its helpful briefing for the debate, "““The Bill provides greater protection to people affected by forced marriage and sends a clear message to all communities that forcing someone into marriage is unacceptable. We believe that this will empower vulnerable women and men and will act as a deterrent in our communities””." The EOC briefing also rightly notes that the Bill will need to be backed up by resources to enable victims to have access to support structures and services, and that strategies for empowering women through education and employment are also needed to achieve a reduction in the incidence of forced marriages. Those are important issues, but at this stage what matters is to secure the Bill’s passage, so that we have an adequate legal framework. We have consulted widely. Before Second Reading we held a public meeting in Parliament that was attended by, for example, the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. We invited key interested individuals and organisations to discuss the Bill. We also discussed the Bill with leading members of the family law Bar who have had significant experience and expertise of forced marriage cases. We discussed the Bill with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and I am delighted that she is here today. We drew on family law extensively in drafting the original Bill, and the Government, as we have just heard, have continued to do that in designing the amendments. After Second Reading, we conducted a public consultation on possible ways to improve the Bill in the light of suggestions made by interested organisations and Members of the House. We published a consultation paper on 7 February and distributed it widely among interested organisations and individuals, including those who had responded to the Government’s original consultation on whether to criminalise forced marriage. We asked some 14 questions about ways in which the Bill could be amended and improved. To assist understanding of the changes, we distributed a mock-up version of how the Bill might look if the changes were made. It is important to go into the question of consultation briefly, because of the importance of making sure that one has widespread support. We received 29 responses from a wide range of groups and individuals, including women’s groups, women’s refuges, religious groups, social workers, family law practitioners, the Bar Council, the Association of Chief Police Officers, the EOC and the CRE. That was in addition to the briefings on the Bill by several groups for the Second Reading debate, including Liberty, the Children’s Rights Alliance for England and the NSPCC. The consultation process demonstrated overwhelming support for the Bill and for many of the changes envisaged by the consultation. We published a summary of responses received, which I have placed in the Library of the House together with the initial consultation documents, which are also available on the Odysseus Trust website. We have also had discussions with those seeking to protect victims of forced marriages and with the victims themselves. I met staff of Karma Nirvana and survivors when I went to Derby to launch Jasvinder Sanghera’s book Shame, and the Minister and I recently visited Ashiana Network, an Asian women’s organisation and refuge in Leystonstone. I met councillors in Tower Hamlets, with the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, and I spoke to hundreds of women at a meeting convened by the Drug and Alcohol Action Programme in Southall. I have been greatly assisted by Khatun Sapnara in discussing with the government team the amendments now tabled on behalf of the Government. She is a leading member of the family law Bar, and about to become to recorder. She has great practical experience in representing victims in the High Court. As noble Lords have heard, the Government have built on the basic principles of the Bill and improved their contents in important ways, already explained by the Minister. I will briefly single some out. First, the Bill would now be incorporated as new Part 4A of the Family Law Act 1996. That will ensure that the problem of forced marriage will be viewed within the wider legal framework around domestic violence, something which many women’s organisations and the EOC were keen to see. The amendments incorporate features of family law which did not appear in the original Bill, such as provision for ex parte orders, scope for undertakings instead of orders and the possibility of attaching the power of arrest to orders. Secondly, while removing the explicit prohibition on forced marriage contained in Clause 1 of the original Bill, the amendments retain the force of the message. It is clear from new Sections 63A and 63B of new Part 4A that wide-ranging orders can be sought to deal with physical and mental coercion not only by immediate family members, but by any who aid, abet, counsel, procure, encourage or assist another person to force or attempt to force a person into marriage. Respondents to our consultations stressed the importance of covering third parties, extended families and family friends, who frequently play a role in forced marriage cases. Thirdly, in line with the overwhelming support expressed in responses to our consultation, new Section 63Q puts the forced marriage guidance issued by the Forced Marriage Unit—to which I pay tribute—on a statutory footing. It does so in a less prescriptive and bureaucratic way than our own mock-up version of the redrafted Bill. Although she is not here today, that was in response to discussions with the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, on that subject. New Section 63Q also contains a powerful directive to those exercising public functions to have regard to the guidance. There was strong support for that approach in our consultation. Many respondents praised the guidance issued by the Forced Marriage Unit, but expressed concern that many agencies and professionals remain unaware of it. We hope that this amendment will ensure that the guidance published by the Forced Marriage Unit is disseminated more widely and taken more seriously by public authorities and others. Fourthly, the amendments ““signpost””—to use the Minister’s word—the available grounds for redress for loss and damage suffered by victims of forced marriage. My original Bill had sought to create a new right to damages as a secondary remedy where preventive relief had failed. We had a lot of discussion about this and I was initially wedded to my original design, but was persuaded that I was mistaken. New Section 63R pursues the preferable course of drawing attention to the existing remedies under the law of tort, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, the Children Act, and other parts of family law, including the law of marriage, among others. As the Minister has explained, that conforms to the general approach of family law, which does not award monetary compensation. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, is here, because of his leadership on the Forced Marriage Unit, which is supported by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Home Office, and the extraordinarily valuable work done by the high commissions in the sub-continent and elsewhere in giving consular protection and other help. As I am sure the noble Lord knows, there is real interest in the Bill in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which extends to Ministers and law-makers. That is important because one cannot really tackle trans-national problems like this unless one seeks to harmonise both law and practice across countries. I hope, if the Bill becomes law, that it will serve as a model for further legislation in south Asia and beyond, as well as within the Council of Europe. There have been moves within the Council of Europe to criminalise forced marriage, an approach which the Government rightly rejected. I hope that the civil approach may be followed up in Europe, where the Minister has an important role, as well as the sub-continent. For all of those reasons, I fully support the government amendments.