Campaigners urge UK conversion practices bill to criminalise prayer, Christian commentator warns

Two Christian Today reports cover the same parliamentary evidence on the draft Conversion Practices Bill, and they describe Jayne Ozanne’s remarks differently. Ozanne is the founder and former chair of the Ban Conversion Practices Coalition and a former member of the Church of England’s General Synod. According to the reports, she told a parliamentary committee taking oral evidence on the draft Bill that current law does not sufficiently cover prayer as a form of conversion practice.

One report says that when Baroness Prentis of Banbury KC asked whether Ozanne would criminalise behaviour within a family, or by a single religious leader praying, Ozanne said the law ought to outlaw that. The same report says that when Labour MP Naz Shah asked about parents of an 11-year-old girl who refused to buy a breast-binder, Ozanne said she could not give a direct answer. Separately, human rights lawyer Akua Reindorf KC posted on X that she would go to prison rather than let an 11-year-old wear a breast binder.

The second report, which uses the headline “Christian LGBT activist says prayer to change sexuality should be criminalised,” gives a different account of the evidence session. It says Ozanne described well-intentioned prayer for those struggling with same-sex attraction as “insidious” and said it should be “criminalised.” It also reports that she said she hoped to place “fear” in the hearts of family members who wish to pray for their LGBT-identifying relatives. The first report does not contain these specific remarks. In this second account, Labour MP Danny Beales asked whether someone praying for another person to become straight should be criminalised, and Ozanne answered, “You’d criminalise it, but whether you’d prosecute [is another matter].” She also said a conversion therapy ban should target stage three, where individuals seek prayer, counselling and even exorcism to remove an LGBT identity.

Both reports describe the penalties in the draft legislation. If the Conversion Practices Bill becomes law, offenders would face up to five years in jail for conversations judged to pressure people to change their sexuality or gender identity. The reports do not say how such judgments would be made in practice. Where the two accounts differ on what Ozanne said, readers should weigh each version as it is reported, since the reports themselves present them differently. Fairness to both sides, as the sources present them, requires keeping those attributions clear (Proverbs 18:17).

Reindorf and former Equality and Human Rights Commission chair Baroness Falkner co-authored a report for the Policy Exchange think tank. According to the first Christian Today report, their report criticises the Bill as ideological, unworkable and wholly unsuitable, and says it threatens the liberties and fundamental human rights of the majority of citizens.

The second report says a range of Christian and free-speech groups warned that the proposed bill is a severe threat to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. It names the Christian Medical Fellowship and Christian Concern among those groups, though the text available to this draft ends there.