Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Bill

Nickie Aiken Excerpts

Friday 19th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for those points. I was not familiar with the teaspoon campaign, which is clearly valuable and important; Members on both sides of the House will find that intervention informative and useful. I would be delighted to receive more information from her or have a conversation about that work separately after the debate. On the point about teaching, I will pick that up with colleagues in the Department for Education and make sure that she receives a full answer.

I touched on the tackling violence against women and girls strategy in my earlier remarks. I will say a bit more about it and the work that is going on through it to tackle forced marriage and other forms of honour-based abuse. We will seek out community advocates who can talk to community audiences and explain why forced marriage and other honour-based abuse crimes are wrong. We will provide them with resources to back up their messages.

The College of Policing will also produce advice for police officers on honour-based abuse, so that first responders and investigators know how to deal with cases. The product for first responders will be published soon. We will also produce a resource pack on forced marriage for local authorities, the police, schools, healthcare services and others, similar to our existing one for female genital mutilation.

The Home Office will explore options to better understand the prevalence of FGM and forced marriage in England and Wales, given their hidden nature and the lack of robust estimates. We will work to criminalise virginity testing and will bring forward legislation when parliamentary time allows, which will be accompanied by a programme of education in community, education and clinical settings to tackle the misperceptions and misbeliefs surrounding the practice.

The Department for Education will work with a small number of local authorities as part of the children’s social care covid-19 regional recovery and building back better fund to identify the challenges and barriers in effective safeguarding work addressing FGM and to develop and disseminate good practice to other local authorities. Various other general commitments are relevant to tackling forced marriage such as our £3 million programme on what works to prevent violence against women and girls and the appointment of Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth as the first full-time national policing lead for violence against women and girls. That is all important.

[Nickie Aiken (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) for an excellent private Member’s Bill. I am delighted that the Government are favourable to it.

Given what the Minister has said about the violence against women and girls strategy, does he agree that it is important that local authorities play a massive role and that, as part of that, perhaps there should be some training for local councillors? Perhaps the Home Office could work alongside the Local Government Association to ensure that there is training for best practice, so that local councillors who are not from communities involved in practices such as marriage under 18 for their children can understand the cultural differences, be more understanding and protect our children.

[Tom Pursglove]

My hon. Friend is a distinguished former council leader in her own right, and she brings an awful lot of experience and knowledge to the proceedings in this House by virtue of that experience at Westminster City Council. I think her point is well made, and it is one that I am very happy to share with the safeguarding Minister—the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean)—who I know looks at these matters very attentively and is always mindful of them.

As someone who has just come into ministerial office, one of the points I have regularly made in the many conversations I have had with officials over the last two months is that cascading best practice is often so important. I always want to be satisfied that we are doing everything we can to cascade best practice where it exists. There are lots of examples out there in lots of different areas of policy, and we do not always need to reinvent the wheel. What we need to do is pick up what is done well, cascade that throughout the wider system and drive forward improvement. My hon. Friend’s point is well made, and I will gladly ensure that it is flagged up.