Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [HL]

Consistency is not necessarily always desirable, but sometimes it is. I do not think that the Official Opposition can make the point that the Bill would drive the practice overseas or underground unless they were opposed to the legislation, which they are not. The same objection could be made to any legislation that sought to tackle forced marriage. That is an important point of principle and is not really a probing point. The aim of the legislation is to offer some kind of effective protection, so the argument about driving the practice underground cannot seriously be pursued. On the matter of undertakings, again the whole point is to provide a sensitive, private and non-adversarial way of coping with the problem. Again I should have thought that that would be consistent with the Opposition’s approach.