Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Bill

Before we get to proceedings, I remind Members of the difference between Report and Third Reading. The scope of the debate on Report is the amendments that I have selected; the scope of the Third Reading debate to follow will be the whole Bill as it stands after Report. Members may wish to consider those points and then decide at which stage or stages they want to try to catch my eye.

Clause 2

Offence of conduct relating to marriage of persons under 18

I beg to move amendment 1, page 1, line 11, leave out “(2)” and insert “(3)”

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment 2, page 1, line 15, leave out “threats or any other form or coercion” and insert “threats, any other form of coercion or deception, and whether or not it is carried out in England and Wales”.

Amendment 3, page 1, line 17, leave out subsection (3).

Amendment 4, page 2, line 3, leave out subsection (6) and insert—

‘(6) After subsection (7) insert—

“(7A) A person commits an offence under subsection (3A) only if—

(a) the conduct is for the purpose of causing the child to enter into a marriage in England or Wales,

(b) at the time of the conduct, the person or child is habitually resident in England and Wales, or

(c) at the time of the conduct, the child is a United Kingdom national who—

(i) has been habitually resident in England and Wales, and

(ii) is not habitually resident or domiciled in Scotland or Northern Ireland.”’

I am pleased to speak to these amendments, which I am confident will make the Bill clearer and cleaner, and provide more effective, targeted and proportionate safeguarding. Before I come to the details of the amendments, I remind hon. Members of the purpose of clause 2, to which all five amendments relate.

Clause 2 will create a new part of the forced marriage offence within the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. Currently, it is only an offence to cause a child to marry if violence, threats or another form of coercion are used, or if the child lacks capacity to consent to marry under the Mental Health Capacity Act 2005. It is not an offence to cause a child to marry if coercion is not used and the child is not covered by that Act. As I set out on Second Reading in November, this is a real loophole. To ensure that all children are protected, the Bill needs to ensure that it is always an offence to cause a child under the age of 18 to enter into a marriage, whatever the methods used.

I propose to start by going through the first three broadly technical amendments, beginning with amendment 3. The existing offence of forced marriage contains a subsidiary offence of deceiving someone into going overseas with the aim of forcing them into marriage there. That is an important addition, because such behaviour is far from uncommon. As it stands, the Bill expressly extends that deception offence to encompass the behaviour entailed in the new offence. However, on reflection, Ministers and I feel that it is not necessary. The new offence that we are adding, of causing a child to marry, refers to

“any conduct for the purpose of causing a child to enter into a marriage before the child’s eighteenth birthday, whether or not the conduct amounts to violence, threats or another form of coercion.”

That would include deceiving a child into going overseas. That means that the provision in the original Bill is unnecessary duplication, and it makes the law less clear than it could and should be. Amendment 3 would remove the express extension of the deception offence to cover the conduct entailed in the new offence of causing a child to marry. I would like to put beyond doubt, on the record, that that new offence does include deceiving a child, be that into going overseas or otherwise.

Will my hon. Friend, like me, welcome the fact that Northern Ireland is consulting on raising the minimum age of marriage to 18? Will she join me in expressing a desire that the Scottish Government should reflect on that and do the same?

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Northern Ireland is consulting, and I think that Scotland is about to do so. That is so important, because, if they do not change, they will not reflect the sustainable development goals that they have signed up to along with us. If they want to abide by those goals, they will have to move forward on that. I look forward to us being one nation all doing the same thing. I thank him for that point.

The first situation is if a marriage is to take place in England or Wales. It can never be right for us to allow the marriage of a child to happen within our borders. The second situation is if the perpetrator or victim is habitually resident—they ordinarily live—in England and Wales. That will ensure that we protect children who live in this country and that those people who live here obey our rules and norms. The final situation is if the child is a UK national who has been habitually resident in England or Wales and who is neither habitually resident nor domiciled in Scotland or Northern Ireland. Domiciled is a slightly different concept from habitual residence: it means the place that someone regards as their permanent home, even if they are actually living somewhere else. So, all UK nationals who have at some point lived in England or Wales, unless they live in or have their permanent home in Scotland or Northern Ireland, will be covered.

One of the effects of those changes is, as I indicated, to show respect for the devolution settlement in a more effective and meaningful way than the Bill does currently. The offence would no longer encompass situations where a parent arranges for their 16 or 17-year-old UK national child who lives in Scotland or Northern Ireland to marry outside the UK, so it would not stop such Scottish or Northern Irish children from exercising the rights under the laws of those countries.

We did consider removing the UK national criteria of the offence in its entirety, but that would mean that, when it came to marriages happening outside England and Wales, we would have had to rely solely on habitual residence, which is a fluid property that can be lost if a person has sufficiently severed their ties with England and Wales. The Girls Not Brides UK coalition, who are experts in this area, were concerned that that could cause perverse behaviour, namely that parents might keep their children overseas before causing them to marry until such time as they lost their habitual residence and, therefore, the protection of the law.

I am delighted to respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham), both for her continued steerage of this vital Bill and for tabling these important amendments. It will not be me who responds to the final stage of the Bill, so, if I may, I will put on record my appreciation, and that of the entire House and I think the whole country, for the work she has done over her whole parliamentary career.

My hon. Friend has been assisted by a number of charities—I believe some are in the Gallery or elsewhere in the House today—and I want to thank them for all the work they have put in. It has been an extremely complex piece of legislation but, together with the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), we have all worked together to navigate through those difficulties. I am also very grateful to Home Office and Ministry of Justice officials, who put in considerable time and effort. We now have a Bill, with the amendments, that will properly protect vulnerable children—very often girls and mostly young girls—who have, unfortunately, suffered the experience of being coerced into marriage without the use of force. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire, I believe that no child should be in a position to be contracting a marriage under the age of 18.

As my hon. Friend set out in her speech, amendments 1 to 3 are minor and technical, and essentially address a duplication in the Bill as it stands. The new offence, which clause 2(2) introduces, would make it illegal to carry out any conduct for the purpose of causing a child to enter into a marriage. Any conduct includes deceiving a child into going overseas for marriage, so we do not need the separate provision for that which clause 2(3) would make. The amendments would therefore remove that duplication, and are in the interests of making legislation which is as clear as it can be to everyone. They also make it clear that the new offence of causing a child to enter into a marriage does include deceiving the child, whether or not that relates to going overseas, although it does not have to include deception.

Amendments 4 and 5 are more substantive and relate to the jurisdictional impact—the territorial reach, if you like—of that new behaviour of causing a child to marry even if coercion is not used. At the moment the jurisdictional provisions for that behaviour mirror those in the existing forced marriage offence: namely that prosecution may occur when the perpetrator and/or the victim is physically present in England and Wales, or if at least one of them is habitually resident in England and Wales, or if both of them are outside the UK and at least one of them is a UK national. The sole exception is that marriages of 16 and 17-year-olds in Scotland and Northern Ireland would never be covered. Let me agree with my hon. Friend in her hope that we see our United Kingdom coming together as one to abide by our commitments to the sustainable development goals to safeguard more young girls from this frankly abhorrent practice of marrying a child before they are ready to do so.

Amendment 5 would remove that exception relating to marriages of 16 and 17-year-olds in Northern Ireland and Scotland. While we made that provision in recognition of the devolution settlement, we came to judge that the potential impact on enforcement was too great. There are too many circumstances in which a parent could evade the law by taking their child to Scotland or Northern Ireland to marry, even if there were no connection with either of those two countries. My hon. Friend has done an extremely good job in setting out clearly the multiple number of scenarios that could apply. I believe that the Bill, once the amendments are agreed to, will have that targeted and proportionate effect.

We also took the view that there were better and more effective ways of respecting the devolution settlement, and that is where amendment 4 comes in. The amendment would replace existing jurisdictional provisions for the new offence of causing a child to marry with provisions that state that a prosecution may occur if the marriage was to take place in England or Wales, or if at least one of the victim or the perpetrator is habitually resident in England or Wales, or if the victim is a UK national who has at some point been habitually resident in England or Wales and is also neither habitually resident nor domiciled in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Taken together, this will ensure that the law extends only to those circumstances where there is a proper connection to England or Wales and not to, for example, UK national children who live in Scotland and marry overseas or UK national children who live and have always lived overseas. The amendments would therefore ensure, for example, that a parent who lives in England could not take their 16-year-old child who also lives in England to Scotland for a traditional ceremonial marriage merely to get around the law, but also that, where a 17-year-old child lives in Scotland and the parent does not live in England or Wales, there is no bar to their seeking to arrange for the child to marry outside the UK. Likewise, if a parent who was a UK national but lived, for example, in Austria arranged for their 17-year-old child, who also lived in Austria and was not even a UK national, to marry in, say, Salzburg, they will now not be caught by this law.

All in all, these amendments make for a Bill that is better targeted, provides more effective safeguarding, is more proportionate and ensures that ultimately, as my hon. Friend said, we capture the people who we want to capture and not those who we do not. Before I conclude, may I once again say a tremendous thank you to my hon. Friend? I commend her for this incredible piece of campaigning work, which she has steered through the parliamentary procedures with admirable determination and drive. It is a tribute to her passion for safeguarding and protecting young girls. I am absolutely inspired by the work she has done. These amendments will make for a more effective Bill, and I confirm the Government’s wholehearted support for them.