Gender providers loopholes will be closed: Health Sec

With your permission, I would like to make a statement on the CAS review of gender identity services for children and young people. And may I say, how pleased I am to be joined by parents of children who have been affected by some of the issues raised in this review. And I hope all of us will bear the sensitivities of this debate in mind as we discuss it this afternoon. This review strikes hard and strikes sure at an area of public policy where fashionable cultural values have overtaken evidence, safety and biological reality. This must now stop. Hear, hear. As recently as 2009, the NH S s Sole Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman Trust received fewer than 60 referrals for children and young people, and just 15 for adolescent girls. Since then, demand has surged. By 2016 / 1700, children and young people a year were referred A34 fold increase. More than half were teenage girls in 2022. More than 5000 children and young people were referred to Gender Identity Clinics and almost 3/4 were female Madam Deputy Speaker. This exponential increase in demand is not a coincidence. It has been driven by a number of factors which I will come on to later, but at its heart it was driven by a myth. This myth was that for children and young people grappling with adolescence who were questioning their identity, their sexuality, all their path in life, that the answer to their questions was inevitably to change gender, to solve their feelings of unease, discomfort or distress. And this near uniform prescription was imposed on children and young people with complex needs without full and thoughtful consideration of their wider needs, including, as is set out in the report, conditions such as neurodiversity experiences such as childhood trauma or experiences of mental health conditions. Or indeed discovering who it is that they may one day fall in love with. Indeed, the response from some of the people who should have protected them, some of the clinicians in charge of their care at the Tavistock clinic was almost always to put them on an irreversible path, blocking puberty, then the prescription of cross sex hormones and onto surgery as an adult. In other words, such professionals were not asking the right questions of themselves or of their patients. It should concern every single member of this House that part of our public space, the NHS, was overtaken by a culture of secrecy and ideology that was allowed to trump evidence and safety. We say enough is enough. Our young people deserve better and we must do whatever it takes to protect them. I also share Doctor Cass’s concerns that clinicians who subscribe to gender ideology will try to use private providers to get around the rules. Let me give a very clear warning. Prescribing is a highly regulated activity and the Care Quality Commission has not licensed any gender clinic to prescribe hormone blockers or cross sex hormones to people under the age of 16. Any clinic that does may be committing extremely serious regulatory offences for which they can have their license revoked and their clinicians can be struck off. My officials have been in contact with the CQC following the final report to ask that they look again at the age thresholds in their licensing conditions. The CQC has also reassured us that they will incorporate Dr. Cass’s recommendations into their safe care and treatment standards for all care providers. This means that all new providers will be asked if their practices respect the Cass Review and all existing providers have to meet the same rigorous standards when they are reviewed by the CQC. My officials met the General Medical Council over the weekend and will do so again in the coming days to understand how they will ensure every clinician on their register follows their code of practice and implements the wider findings of the Cass Review. It is morally and medically reprehensible that some online providers not registered in the UK has stated their intention to continue to issue prescriptions to children in this country, and I am looking closely at closing what can be done to curtail any loopholes in prescribing practices, including legislative options. Nothing is off the table and I will update the House in due course as we progress this work at PACE.