After Eight Years of Promises, England and Wales Finally Have a Conversion Therapy Bill

For nearly a decade, “we will ban conversion therapy” has been one of the emptiest promises in British politics — pledged, shelved, re-pledged, and quietly dropped by one government after another since 2018. On June 25, the promise finally took the form of actual legislative text. The UK government published a draft bill to ban conversion practices in England and Wales, and on the two questions that have sunk every previous attempt, it landed on the side campaigners had been asking for: the ban is trans-inclusive, and it has teeth.

What the bill actually does

The draft sets the criminal threshold as conduct that “aims to change someone’s sexual orientation or transgender identity through abusive acts that seriously harm the victim.” Anyone convicted could face up to five years in prison, an unlimited fine, or both.

Three features make this bill more serious than the vague commitments that preceded it.

First, it covers gender identity, not just sexual orientation. The long fight over previous drafts was whether trans people would be protected or carved out; earlier proposals wobbled on exactly this point, and some collapsed under it. This one explicitly includes conversion practices aimed at a person’s transgender identity. That is the difference between a symbolic ban and one that reaches the practices trans people are most often subjected to.

Second, it reaches beyond Britain’s borders. The bill creates an offence for encouraging or assisting conversion practices carried out outside England and Wales when the target is a UK national or resident. This is aimed squarely at a well-documented workaround: families sending a young person abroad — to a relative’s country, a religious programme, a clinic in a jurisdiction with no such law — to have “treatment” done where the domestic ban can’t touch it. Extraterritorial reach is hard to enforce in practice, but writing it into the offence closes the most obvious escape hatch.

Third, it adds civil protection. Alongside the criminal offence, the bill introduces civil conversion practice protection orders — a mechanism that lets courts intervene to protect someone believed to be at risk before abuse occurs, rather than only prosecuting after the harm is done. For minors in particular, that preventive tool may end up mattering more than the prison sentence.

The line the government is trying to walk

The government has been careful about how it defines the offence, and that care is doing real work. By tying the crime to “abusive acts that seriously harm the victim,” the drafters are trying to draw a boundary between conversion practices and ordinary life — a parent’s anxious conversation, a therapist’s exploratory questions, a religious leader’s sermon.

That threshold has already drawn fire from two directions, which is usually a sign a drafter has found roughly the right place to stand. Free-speech campaigners argue the “abuse” threshold is still too loose and could chill legitimate religious teaching or clinical caution. LGBTQ+ advocates worry the opposite — that setting the bar at “seriously harm” leaves room for coercive but non-violent practices, the slow psychological grind that is the most common form conversion takes, to slip through. Where exactly the line ends up will be the substance of the fight to come.

The Ministry of Justice has been blunt about what it is targeting, listing beatings and rape alongside verbal threats and sustained manipulation among practices still happening in the UK today. That framing matters, because “conversion therapy” is a euphemism that can make people picture a clinical setting. Much of what the bill describes is simply abuse with a purpose attached.

Why this is a milestone — and why it isn’t the finish line

It would be easy, from mainland Europe, to treat a British conversion therapy ban as overdue catch-up rather than news. Malta banned the practice in 2016. Germany, France, and a growing list of others followed. The UK has spent those years talking. So the honest framing is this: England and Wales are late, and the delay caused real harm to real people who were told help was coming and then watched it not arrive.

But late progress is still progress, and this draft is notably stronger than what many countries settled for. A trans-inclusive ban with criminal penalties, extraterritorial reach, and preventive civil orders is close to the model advocates have argued for — not a watered-down gesture.

The caveats are equally honest. This is a draft bill. It now goes out for consultation before MPs vote on it, and consultation is precisely where the last several attempts died — amended into incoherence, or delayed until a reshuffle buried them. The trans-inclusive scope, in particular, will be the target of intense lobbying to narrow or remove it, in a political climate where trans rights have become a proxy for larger battles. Scotland and Northern Ireland, which handle this separately, are not covered.

So the right posture is cautious optimism with attention paid. After eight years, England and Wales have a real bill on the table, and it is a good one. Whether it becomes a real law — with its protections intact — depends on the months ahead. For once, though, there is something concrete to defend rather than another promise to wait on. That itself is worth marking.