The Conversion Practices Bill

Is this capable of bringing down both the criminal AND family justice systems? Much more work needs to be done to analyse the impact of this bill on the already tottering family justice system.

On 25 June 2026 the Government published the ‘Conversion Practices Draft Bill’ the promised and long awaited attempt to criminalise attempts to ‘convert’ people out of being gay or ‘trans’ - despite the fact that the acts complained of such as ‘corrective rape’ or assault are already very serious criminal offences and despite the lack of evidence that ‘conversion practices’ are carried out in the UK routinely or at all.

Section 1(2) provides for an extremely wide offence - a ‘conversion practice’ means any conduct carried out by a person towards an individual, causing that individual to have or not to have, or to believe or not to believe that they have a sexual orientation or a transgender identity.

There is a protection for medical professionals under section 1(3) where the conduct is carried out in the course of providing health care services. This will not be a ‘conversion practice’ unless that person acts in a way that falls ‘far below the standards reasonably expected’.

Pursuant to section 2(1) the ‘abusive conversion practice’ must cause serious harm to the individual’s physical or mental health or serious alarm or distress which has a ‘substantial adverse effect on their usual day to day activities’.

As the cross examination of ‘Samantha Tempest’ continues in his claim against his employers by allowing him to be ‘harassed’ by any ‘gender critical’ view expressed in the workplace, we don’t have to go far to see an example of how those claiming a trans identity will assert that even mild mannered online posts which do not 100% ‘affirm’ the reality of a trans identity, will be claimed to cause immediate and very significant harm. See the posts from Tribunal Tweets about the frankly incredible evidence given by Mr Tempest in the recent tribunal hearing.

‘Transgender identity’ includes an individual identifying as ‘neither male nor female or as not solely male or female’. This is a ‘status’ unknown to any other legislation and would seem to be an attempt to dodge the ruling of the Supreme Court in 2025 about the definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010 and the protected characteristic of ‘gender reassignment’ which does not include some nebulous ‘neither one nor the other’.

The draft has the distinction of being immediately reviled by almost everyone, save for a group of proudly smug MPs, too busy patting themselves on the back to deal with the volley of concerned questions as to how it would operate.

Jolyon Maugham for example is annoyed by the ‘massive carve out’ for the provision of health care services, and expresses himself in his usual measured and reasonable way. Any ‘crank’ providing mental health services is providing ‘health care services’ - indeed it has become ‘orthodox’ for the NHS to engage in ‘abusive conversion therapy’. I assume by this he means the year long investigation into the very serious failures of the WellBN clinic who carried out little or no assessment of 78 child patients before medically transitioning them. But not to worry! The Good Law Project now hopes to take over payment for at least 15 of those children and get them treated at Susie Green’s latest venture, Anne Health.

It begs an interesting question as to whether the GLP could be charged with an abusive conversion practice if any of those children were acting out of internalised homophobia. Maybe this cloud will have some silver linings…

Criminal barrister Dennis Kavanaugh has written and spoken at length about his concerns of the consequences of this Bill.

Further, it permits a private prosecution of the conversion offence, without requiring permission from the Attorney General or Director of Public Prosecutions. This provides an easy route for vexatious or politically motivated prosecutions and we already have a wealth of evidence about how attractive this is likely to be to the Good Law Project.

My immediate and serious concerns are shared with Dennis - how this will be applied to parents and children. Expressing shock or concern that a prepubescent child wants to embark on medical transition clearly falls within ‘any conduct’ even though we have clear evidence of the really serious harm that can come to children who are encouraged to ‘transition’ by cowboy ‘for profit’ outfits - see re J 2024 where a teenage girl was found to be at risk of sudden death from the high doses of testosterone prescribed to her by Gender GP. The court warned against any parent getting involved with Gender GP. So is the court guilty of a ‘conversion practice’ here?

The ‘chilling effect’ of a criminal prosecution on responsible and protective parents is obvious.

Impact on the Family Justice System

But there is a further and very serious impact, which I can see no evidence that the drafters of this Bill have considered, and that is the impact on the family justice system.

The Children Act 1989 recognises that the state may only interfere in the article 8 rights of parents to bring up their children as they see fit, when their children are beyond parental control or have suffered/are at risk of suffering significant harm. The state must tolerate a very wide range of parenting. There is no definition of ‘significant harm’ in the Act - we are supposed to know it when we see it. Harm is defined at section 31(9) as ‘ill-treatment or the impairment of health or development including, for example, impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another’.

It is very difficult to see how, if parents are facing charges of ‘conversion practices’ that a local authority would not consider this at least a risk of significant harm, and therefore be under a statutory duty to apply for care or supervision orders, and in the worst case scenario apply for the immediate removal of the child - or even all the children in the family.

For example, parents who have read the Cass Review and followed the changes to NHS policy to withdraw access to medical transition from children in light of the very uncertain evidence of benefit, destroy the testosterone in possession of their 14 year old child. Their child got hold of this by forging her mother’s signature on relevant documents.

She is very distressed and makes a complaint against the police that her parents are trying to force her to be a ‘cis girl’ not the boy she knows herself to be. The 14 year old has a 10 year old sibling who declares himself ‘non binary’. He is also clearly at risk from his parents bigoted attitudes towards ‘transgender identity’

Quite apart from the grotesque interference posed by this Bill to parental rights pursuant to article 8 ECHR and the natural (essential) desire of the vast majority of parents to keep their children safe, it is clear to me that the practical implications of all this have been given zero thought.

The bill now enters pre-legislative scrutiny prior to its formal parliamentary introduction. Given the quality of our present Parliamentarians I am bleakly pessimistic of their ability to give it the scrutiny it deserves. We may well be entering into another era of LawFare which will dwarf all that has gone before.

Where exactly are the children going to go if it is deemed ‘not safe’ to be at home, or their parents have been convicted, and there are no family members willing to step up? We already have a crisis in lack of foster carers and regulated residential accommodation. Increasing the numbers of looked after children is a terrible idea.

The Explanatory Notes do not contain any analysis on the impact of the family justice system or foster care. The Economic Impact Assessment and an Equality Impact Assessment simply provide that impacts on the wider justice system are being assessed with the Ministry of Justice.

There is currently no attempt to consider what numbers of additional foster placements might be needed if children are removed when parents are charged or after they are convicted. There is no attempt to predict the extra strain on the family justice system of the cost of additional care proceedings - where parents have non means and non merits tested legal aid.

This is work that needs to be done urgently, alongside a clear analysis of the bill itself being challenged as a disproportionate and unlawful breach of parents’ article 8 rights pursuant to the ECHR.

Conclusion - LawFare it is

As Dennis Kavanaugh says

how do you parent in this situation… the harm threshold is very low and it can be anything … why don’t parents have the same protection as doctors? … this is a very, very dangerous piece of legislation… it exposes parents to the wholesale violation of their article 8 rights and I think it has the potential to turn children against parents which is pretty ugly. You can’t just legislate for this stuff and pretend the Tavistock didn’t happen… we are not going to forget the Tavistock, we are not going to let you treat parents like this, you have got to stop lumping gay people in with transgender issues… you pass this and you bang a lot of parents up and you stop them protecting their children… I think you are finished as a political movement. This is worse than section 28 which wasn’t a criminal statute. Game on. Expect a fight'