The £360,000 helpline that didn’t ring

Why is the government claiming to have evidence that 90,000 people a year suffer conversion therapy when almost no cases were ever reported to its national helpline?

When the government unveiled its draft bill to criminalise so-called “conversion practices” on 25th June, ministers and officials said they had evidence of a serious problem.

For proof, equalities minister Olivia Bailey pointed to a newly published report by LGBT charity Galop. It was described as containing “hundreds of case studies” demonstrating widespread abuse taking place across Britain today. The Cabinet Office claimed to have evidence of tens of thousands of people being victimised. But dig into the numbers and the picture changes dramatically.

Read Conversion therapy: still not illegal – or still not happening?

Following the evidence

Galop’s report Still not illegal: Evidence of modern-day conversion practices from Galop’s frontline services analyses case notes the charity collected between 2022 and 2025. It is presented as “some of the strongest evidence yet” that conversion practices are widespread.

Researchers examined records from around 13,500 Galop clients over three years. From those they identified:

• 371 potential cases of conversion practice

• 195 cases with sufficient detail for analysis

• just 132 recent cases

• only 29 cases that came through any of Galop’s helplines.

Only 51 clients approached Galop seeking help specifically because of alleged conversion practices. Most were already receiving support for issues such as domestic abuse, “honour”-based abuse, forced marriage, sexual violence, homelessness or asylum issues. That hardly suggests an epidemic requiring the creation of new criminal offences.

Meanwhile the Cabinet Office is citing a debunked Stonewall survey that claims tens of thousands of people are undergoing exorcism every year.

The Ban Conversion Therapy coalition of campaigning organisations has more members than the number of “case studies” of conversion therapy reported by Galop in Still not illegal.

The £360,000 helpline

The government presents the Galop report as if the charity is an independent observer. It fails to mention that Galop was paid £360,000 over three years to operate the government’s National Conversion Therapy Helpline.

When the service was commissioned, officials expected as many as 10,000–15,000 callers every year. Instead, the evidence presented in the report strongly suggests that only a handful of conversion-therapy reports were ever received.

Taxpayers deserve to know whether this spending represented value for money before ministers commit even more public funding.

What was reported to the helpline?

The cases in Galop’s report vary widely and are extremely short on detail. A few involve genuinely horrific crimes:

• rape

• sexual assault

• physical violence

• forced marriage

• kidnapping

• coercive control

• false imprisonment.

These are appalling, but they are already criminal offences. No new ban is required for them to be prosecuted.

Many other examples are far less serious, including interfamilial tension that is no doubt distressing but should not be criminalised. Some involve parents of the individuals in the case studies:

• insisting homosexuality is “just a phase”

• refusing to use preferred names or pronouns

• encouraging a child to marry

• praying for them

• taking them to church or a mosque

• arguing about sexuality or gender identity.

Others involve family estrangement, emotional pressure or religious disagreement. These situations may be painful, and in some circumstances may be abusive. But that does not mean entirely new criminal offences should be created.

There is not a single example of the historical practices involving electric shocks or aversion techniques that most people understand by “conversion therapy”.

A solution looking for a problem

Galop joined the Ban Conversion Therapy coalition before the Government Equalities Office (GEO) opened bidding to run the national helpline with criteria that, in effect, required applicants to be already operating a similar service. It ended up being the sole bidder for a contract that seemed tailor-made for it. And now ministers are using research it produced, alongside research from Stonewall, to seek to justify both new criminal legislation and continued funding for the helpline that didn’t ring.

That creates at the least the appearance of circularity. Campaigners claim a serious problem exists. The GEO funds an organisation linked to that campaign to investigate it. The organisation writes a report supporting the campaign objectives. The government cites that report as independent evidence for new legislation and further funding.

This is not robust evidence-based policymaking.

Victims of domestic abuse, “honour”-based violence, forced marriage, assault and sexual violence deserve protection. But those protections already exist in law.

The question is not whether abuse should be punished. It is whether creating a new category of crime called “conversion practices” adds anything useful for victims or prosecutors, or simply creates a distraction from using existing safeguarding powers and domestic-abuse legislation to tackle real crimes with worryingly low conviction rates.

The impact assessment for the proposed new law contains a calculation based on a Stonewall survey that came up with a widely debunked estimate of 10% of LGBT people having undergone exorcism to change their gender identity or sexual orientation. Based on this survey, the government estimates that around 80,000 people undergo conversion practices in the UK each year.

Parliament should now ask some simple questions:

• How many genuine cases of conversion therapy did the £360,000 helpline receive?

• How many resulted in police investigations?

• Which harms are not already covered by existing criminal law?

• Why does the government believe a new offence is necessary?

• Why is the government relying on a widely criticised Stonewall opinion survey as its main source of evidence?

Some fantastical estimates from Stonewall plus a few brief accounts of family conflict and religious disagreement along with a handful of more serious incidents that already fall under existing laws from Galop hardly constitute the strong case for new criminal legislation that ministers suggest. Evidence should drive policy, not the other way around.

Read more about conversion therapy.