Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Bill — House of Commons, 2022-02-25
Topic: Civil Rights
Richard John Holden (Conservative, Centre-right): I am honoured to be able to speak today and I was delighted to serve on the Committee with my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) in the earlier stages of the Bill. It is great to follow my hon. Friends the Members for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie), for Devizes (Danny Kruger) and for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) and others who have made great speeches As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire knows, the Bill will have to go through the other place as well, so it is great to see Baroness Sugg in the Gallery, who has been great in supporting me in some of the legislation that I have been pushing for on banning hymenoplasty and virginity testing. I know that my hon. Friend has also been working with Payzee, Karma Nirvana and others who are also in the Gallery, who have been supportive in pushing this legislation forwards and in pushing for rights for women and girls in many other areas We need to concentrate on the small number of people who are using the exemption at the moment. They are not the children themselves, but their parents and other adults who are pushing them into it. The hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma), in his superb speech, mentioned the importance of education and how people should be pursuing objectives in their lives before making big decisions such as marriage. It was a powerful speech and it is great that the Bill has fantastic cross-party support I am also delighted that the amendments have been made to the Bill, especially on the issue of deceiving a child, and it is great that progress has been made to tighten up the amendments relating to judicial scope. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire referred to, the Gretna Green amendment, which relates to domiciliary versus habitual residency, is important and plays into what hon. Members have spoken about relating to Scotland and Northern Ireland. I hope that those devolved nations look at the recommendations of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and at the superb letter from the Joint Committee on Human Rights by the Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who emphasised the points that were made and how they support the actions taken in the Bill As hon. Members have mentioned, changing the law is one thing but changing attitudes is another. As with my amendments to the Health and Care Bill about virginity testing and hymenoplasty, I hope making this change to the law will actually drive real cultural changes. We are showing leadership by changing the law in this House, but only by embedding those cultural changes will we see changes not only in this country but across the rest of the world This is one of the many measures from Back Benchers that this Government have been supporting. I hope that they will do more on women’s rights, which are often one of those things where battles feel that they may have already been won, but that is definitely not the case. As we have seen with various private Members’ Bills and amendments to other Bills over the past year or two, there is still further to go. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire on doing what she has done and thank Members from across the House for their support for her. I hope that we can all continue to push forward on some of these issues, because these battles are still to be won.