The Cabinet Office has published its impact assessment of the government bill to ban conversion practices – acts which attempt to change someone’s sexuality or ‘gender identity’.
It projects that introducing a ban on LGBT conversion practices will yield benefits worth an impressive £783 million over the next ten years. The catch is that this estimate is based on a survey that found one in ten LGBTQ+ people have experienced an exorcism.
There is only one possible outcome of a report based on such a cascade of assumptions: nonsense. If the data is so poor that your estimate might be out by a factor of ten or more, you should confess that you haven’t a clue
Using this survey, the Cabinet Office has estimated that 4.7 per cent of LGBTQ+ people experience conversion practices every year. This contrasts rather sharply with the government’s own 2018 National LGBT survey which found that only 2 per cent of LGBT people had undergone conversion therapy over their entire lifetime.
The difference between these figures is dramatic. It’s not straightforward to compare an annual figure with a lifetime figure. If 4.7 per cent of LGBT adults were selected at random each year to receive conversion therapy, you would expect 78 per cent in surveys to have experienced conversion therapy at some point in their life. But let’s be more conservative and guess that conversion therapy lasts five years, which reduces the number of different people who receive the therapy in total. In that case you would expect about 26 per cent to have experienced it by the time of the survey. This gives a factor of 13 difference between the lifetime figure implied by the Stonewall survey and the National LGBT survey. Enough to change a £783 million bonanza to a £60 million damp squib.
