On Wednesday 20th November at 4pm, we’re proud to announce that Parliament “finally” opened its doors to a debate on the heinous problem of conversion therapy, at Westminster Hall. You can find the full text of this 30-minute debate on Hansard here. The debate was arranged by Sandra Osborne MP, the same person who tabled our group’s Early Day Motion against conversion therapy, and we’d just like to place on record our immense gratitude for the excellent, outstanding work she’s done on this issue.

My main reason for writing this blog is just to set out in detail some of the main points covered in the debate and to say a bit about our group’s role in it. This isn’t going to be a particularly short, easy-to-read (or indeed much-read) blog post I’m sure, but I hope it’ll give as comprehensive an account as possible about everything that happened.

After the Early Day Motion was tabled in June 2013 and our petition submitted in July, we were keen to do something else when Parliament came back after the summer recess to sustain the high profile of conversion therapy. We thought of doing either a Westminster Hall Debate or a backbench business debate. Sandra Osborne was contacted about this a few weeks ago and she was very much up to arranging one. We were fortunately helped by the fact that Geraint Davies MP had, soon after becoming aware of the heinous problem of conversion therapy, started his own campaign calling for the regulation of counselling and psychotherapy. Sharon Hodgson MP was also made Labour’s Shadow Minister for Equalities in October’s reshuffle. She was very concerned about the problem and, by sheer coincidence, contacted Diana Johnson’s office to explore arranging a Debate  just as we were sorting things out with Sandra Osborne.

It was very quickly organised and a raft of MPs from all parties were contacted. We were initially hoping for a full 90-minute Westminster Hall Debate but, unfortunately, ended up with a shorter, 30-minute one – and as you can see from the transcript, this left things a bit tight. In the end, we think at least eleven MPs showed up – though because not all spoke and as Hansard doesn’t record attendees, it’s not 100% clear. These were:

– Sandra Osborne MP (Lab, Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock).

– Diana Johnson MP (Lab, Hull North and Shadow Crime and Security Minister).

– Sharon Hodgson MP (Lab, Washington and Sunderland West and Shadow Equalities Minister).

– Geraint Davies MP (Lab, Swansea West).

– Nia Griffith MP (Lab, Llanelli).

–  Crispin Blunt MP (Con, Reigate).

–  Simon Kirby MP (Con, Brighton Kemptown).

– Iain Stewart (Con, Milton Keynes South).

– Mike Freer (Con, Finchley and Golders Green).

– Andrew Percy (Con, Brigg and Goole).

– Stephen Gilbert (LD, St Austell and Newquay).

– Norman Lamb (LD, North Norfolk and Minister of State for Care and Support), responding for the government.

Sandra Osborne kicked off the debate by setting out the all-too-familiar issues with the practice of conversion therapy before starting to ask the government a set of questions about how they plan to address the problem. Here’s a summary of her key questions to the Minister:

– The Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) mandates the public sector to pro-actively drive forward improvements to reduce inequalities for protected minorities, such as LGBT people. This is a vital legislative vehicle for ensuring that the right form of therapy – namely gay affirmative therapy, which starts from the premise that sexuality isn’t an illness and can’t be changed – is offered to LGBT patients, and embedded into the training regimes of university undergraduate courses and professional training sessions. Affirmative therapy isn’t about steam-rolling over a patient’s religious beliefs – quite the opposite. If an LGBT patient has religious convictions, this is about reconciling them.

– Psychotherapy needs to be regulated to ensure that nobody can call themselves one without being part of a professional body. But, in the absence of any willingness to countenance such moves, the least the government could do is ensure that psychotherapists who are not members of professional bodies are not commissioned for services by the NHS, and that there is a clear policy against offering services to non-accredited counsellors and psychotherapists. Government can also implement Practitioner Full Disclosure (PFD): a legal requirement for all therapists – whether in an unregulated profession or not – to make public their full professional history, including any professional bodies they have been struck off from, to better-inform their patients. Last but not least, we have to ensure that the complaints procedures in place for psychotherapist professional bodies are simple, friendly and effective – no good having a complaints procedure if it’s overly-formal or overly-bureaucratic, or if (as some of the psychotherapist organisations do…) they charge members of the public if their complaint is rejected.

– Finally, conversion therapy, at the very least, has to be banned for under-18s and we should certainly explore a full ban. This is part and parcel of a wider need to create what US conversion therapy sufferer Matthew Shurka has called a “red flag”. Restrictions on advertisements are another part. I could expand on this: we might accept that enforcing a full ban might not work in practice, or that a ban for under-18s will still keep conversion therapy for over-18s legal, but that’s not the point. This is all about making sure that everybody knows how heinous, harmful and ineffective conversion therapy is and steering any anxious, vulnerable LGBT people away from going down this route – anything that works towards this goal is helpful.

The Minister’s response was frankly disappointing. He failed to address most, if not virtually all, of the above issues,  saying nothing about banning or restrictions on advertisements and indeed nothing on the Public Sector Equality Duty – so two key planks of the debate there just ignored. He was also very poor on the specifics of psychotherapy regulation and all of the ways (set out above) that they could make the voluntary register more effective. Yet he fully acknowledged that the voluntary register put forward by the government didn’t – and wasn’t intended to – prevent unregulated psychotherapists from practicing. If I could squeeze out a few of the “arguments”, at a push I’d say the following. I copy my counter-points, where relevant, in the footnotes:

– Regulation of psychotherapy won’t address the problem of conversion therapy. Even if psychotherapy were fully-regulated people can, after all, just practice outside this sector. This is a key argument and I’d have expected the Minister to have used it more – there is clearly a debate to be had about regulation, and what form it takes.[1]

– It’s already against NHS rules to commission conversion therapy, and any GP doing can be struck off already. The powers are already there. Moreover, he has found no evidence that Clinical Commissioning Groups or other parts of the NHS have commissioned conversion therapy. [2]

– The main UK psychotherapy organisations have made statements against this, and he is currently consulting with them about making a joint statement against the practice.

– But there seem to be some potential moves on psychotherapy. The government is due to meet with a range of relevant professionals in spring next year, and will also be writing to statutory regulators subject to the progress of the Private Members’ Bill. There appears from his answer to be some prospect for some of the broader issues about inequalities in healthcare and mental health provision for LGBT people, as well as strengthening the voluntary register, to be discussed there. In his answer, he also doesn’t rule out the prospect of psychotherapy regulation in the future – a key concession. Lamb has also committed to meeting with the MPs who attended the debate to discuss the problem.

So where do we go from here? I think the Minister’s response leaves us with a bit of an opening so there’s scope to do quite a bit. The first response should be to write a joint letter to Norman Lamb setting out, in full and with absolute clarity, exactly what the issues with conversion therapy are – and exactly how it can be regulated. This will cover the gaping holes left in Lamb’s response at Westminster Hall and allow a measured, considered response to be made.

[1] My chief problem with this argument, however, is that unlike other professions which aren’t regulated like, for example, “life coach”, I think “psychotherapist” has a bit more ‘umph to it.  People inherently trust the title of “psychotherapist”, quite apart from any qualifications the individual has. Fully-regulating this name will thus have an effect in driving people away from conversion therapy precisely because it would protect a profession which sounds more legitimate than other names out on the market. But there is more to this argument. As Sandra briefly alluded to in her speech, there is a historic link between psychotherapists and conversion therapists. A branch of psychotherapy has continued to propagate conversion. So regulating psychotherapy has an added benefit in this regard. If it were not the case – if dealing with psychotherapy through regulation was to have no effect at all – then why, pray tell, would Core Issues (as Sandra said!) have gone to the effort of lobbying every MP in the Commons to vote against Geraint Davies’ Private Members Bill?

[2] This appears to misunderstand how much conversion therapy might be “commissioned”. Certainly, when I’ve said “commissioning”, formal commissioning at the Clinical Commissioning Group level isn’t quite what I had in mind. There is surely scope for informal de facto passing-on of patients to conversion therapists at local level without anything being written down. That kind of “commissioning” definitely took place in the 1990s if an academic survey of conversion therapists is to believed; and Lesley Pilkington told Patrick Strudwick in 2009-10 that she got her clients from a GP’s surgery – either she’s lying, or they were “commissioned” informally in exactly this way, because they sure as hell didn’t show up on any NHS records of what was commissioned.