I cannot tell you, Mr Speaker, how much I welcome this Bill and how grateful I am to my good friend the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Mrs Latham) for all her work campaigning on such an important topic over years. I wish to make it clear that this is not about race, religion or even the institution of marriage; it is about child protection. I also thank the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), for all his work on not only this issue but child protection across the board.
I thank the organisations Karma Nirvana and IKWRO and the campaigning group Girls Not Brides; they have been campaigning on this issue and helping us all for many years.
I should clarify one point: the vast majority of child marriages involve girls, but occasionally they involve boys, and that is often when the family believe that the boy might be gay.
Let me talk a little about the scale of this issue. Last year, around a quarter of the 753 cases dealt with by the UK’s forced marriage unit involved children under the age of 18. Between 2007 and 2017, some 3,096 marriages involving children aged 16 and 17 were legally registered in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics. Under the new law in the Bill, it will be absolutely clear to everyone that no child should face child marriage—whether the marriage is registered or not—and the harms it causes.
As the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire said, registered child marriages at 16 and 17 are only part of the picture. The ONS statistics do not capture non-registered and religious marriages in the UK. In the past year, Karma Nirvana has supported 76 cases involving child marriages, and only 5% of them were registered. The overwhelming 95%—72 out of 76 marriages—were non-registered and religious marriages, which is why the Bill is so important: it covers registered and non-registered marriages. The fact that some marriages are non-registered makes safeguarding even harder and, therefore, child protection more challenging.