Clause 1

Part of Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Bill [Lords] – in a Public Bill Committee at 10:30 am on 17 July 2007.

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Photo of Dominic Grieve Dominic Grieve Shadow Attorney General 10:30, 17 July 2007

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Hood, and I hope that, although the Committee will proceed quickly, it will nevertheless consider one or two rather important issues.

Amendment No. 12, tabled by the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire, is sensible. I have tabled a new clause, but I do not see it identified on the selection list. I was conscious when I tabled it that it might pose certain procedural problems in relation to the scope of the Bill. However, I hope that I may be allowed to allude to it, as it touches on a similar point, and now may be a good time to raise the matter.

The key issue is the protection of the vulnerable, particularly those who might not be able to express their wishes and feelings with the facility that others may have. During the debate on Second Reading and during the proceedings in the other place, there was a general assumption that we were dealing with forced marriages in the context of people who were of reasonable intellect and sound mind. However, a lot of evidence suggests that forced marriages occur in circumstances where that is not the case.

In my constituency, or just on the edge of it, there is a special school that I visit from time to time. It is in fact just over the border in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), but we both take an interest and have visited it because it is linked to the local settlement in my constituency. It is an outstanding school for girls with a high number of Asian pupils. On my visit, the head teacher told me something that I was shocked to learn. She said that it is absolutely standard for girls, on reaching the age of 16, to be taken out of the school and sent to the Indian subcontinent to be married. Most of the girls have moderate learning disabilities, and it is questionable whether the concept of marriage or the issues surrounding it are within their knowledge. That is a matter of particular concern on which we must focus.

From the information that I was given on that visit, it struck me that forced marriage is not just an occasional occurrence, but that there is something fairly systematic about it. That was of considerable concern to the head teacher, but there was nothing much that she could do about it. One of the issues raised by the hon. Lady in amendment No. 12 is that it would provide a mechanism for ensuring that a person in that position could better give evidence or make representations to the courts. I am wholly in favour of that. If I have a question mark, it is that such an amendment is unnecessary, because the rules of court might already enable such representations to happen, but the Minister will doubtless be able to help us on that.

In new clause 1, I suggest that one possible avenue might be a system not of registering foreign marriages after they have taken place, as the Minister thought that I argued on Second Reading, but of requiring British nationals resident in Britain who intend to contract a marriage abroad to register the names and addresses of the parties before that marriage takes place. The merit of such a system would be that, if a marriage was to be contracted between a person with learning disabilities who was resident in this country and a person abroad, when the resident turned up to carry out the registration, it would be apparent to the registrar that a forced marriage might be taking place.

The failure or the refusal to register such a marriage would mean that the marriage could not be regarded as valid in this country, which might provide a powerful inhibition to those who seek to use the system for whatever convenience it might provide, whether in respect of immigration, family relationships or whatever. Registration would make forced marriage harder and would deter people from seeking to carry it out. It is the difference between unravelling something after it has happened and preventing it from taking place.

I am conscious that I am straying a little, and I apologise. I may get another opportunity to come back  to this at a later stage, but I fear that I may not, because my new clause does not feature on the selection list, for reasons that I understand in the context of the Bill. I hope that the Minister will take the suggestion on board, because it will be regrettable if we lose the opportunity of looking at a device that in my view would be simple and go a long way towards preventing forced marriages from happening in the first place. One of the things that might happen as a result of such a measure is that, if the registrar feared that a forced marriage was taking place, he could make a precise reference to the court. Amendment No. 12, tabled by the hon. Lady, would then enable a careful examination of the matter.

At the moment, I simply wish to tease out the issue, but it seems that this is probably the only substantive debate that we are likely to have on the Bill. It is a key issue, and we need to look at whether we can improve the Bill. As I think the Minister knows, most of my other amendments are of a probing nature, so that we can come to understand what the Government have put in the Bill. As far as I can see, the Bill has been extremely well drafted, or re-drafted, in the other place.