The debate over the Same Sex Marriage Act has passed. The Act has become law. Over 15,000 couples have taken advantage of the new opportunity and whatever people on the opposite side of the argument then or now think the world has not fallen in. However, just as some of us argued at the time, the extension of marriage has unwittingly created a new inequality and a government which argued zealously that Same Sex Marriage was an equality issue seems to have totally lost interest when it comes to an equality that affects opposite sex couples. The new inequality is marriage being available to same sex and opposite sex couples whilst civil partnerships are available only to same sex couples.
Some people may say, so what? They have always been able to get married, in a church, in a register office even in medieval castles or exotic beaches or increasingly wherever takes your fancy. The problem is that a great many opposite sex couples choose not to go down the marriage route. The Office for National Statistics estimates that there are some 2,893,000 cohabiting opposite sex couples in this country – almost double the figure reported 15 years earlier. And around a third of them have children. Indeed cohabitation is the fastest growing form of family in the UK and we need to recognise that our society is changing, just as we did when recognising same sex partnerships in law back in 2004.
People choose not to get involved in the paraphernalia of formal marriage for a variety of reasons: it is too much of an establishment thing to do; it is identified as an innately religious institution for many, and even if done in a register office, it has religious connotations; some see it as having a patriarchal side, so it is seen as some form of social control. Those are not my own views, but are certainly the way many see it.
There are a whole lot of complex motives as to why many of our constituents do not go down the formal marriage route. They are mostly still in committed, loving relationships, but if they do not want to go for traditional marriage, they have no way of having that recognised in the eyes of the state. Particularly worrying is the common misconception that there is such a thing as a common law wife or husband, as a woman typically finds out abruptly on the death of a partner, when there is an inheritance tax bill on the estate, and potentially on the family home. If a woman has a child with her partner and the relationship breaks down, she is not entitled to any form of financial support if they are not married. There is no automatic entitlement to property, even if she had been paying into the mortgage.
Where one partner is much older than the other and there is a reasonable expectation that one will die some years before the other, the long-term survivor would not receive the same tax benefits as a married woman or those in a civil partnership, which would be discriminatory towards the couple’s children. Even a couple engaged to be married have more rights than a cohabiting couple. Offering a formalised role of opposite sex civil partnership could save a lot of retrospective ignorance and ensuing heartache.
These are all reasons for natural justice and protecting rights of partners behind why I am promoting a Private Member’s Bill to extend civil partnerships to opposite sex couples and have been trying to change the legislation since 2013. This Friday my Bill will have a further airing in the House of Commons but without Government support is unlikely to make headway. That is despite the fact that it has support from MPs on all sides of the House and has instigated a nationwide campaign which so far has attracted over 71,000 signatures to a petition.
High profile supporters of the Bill Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan appeared at the Royal Courts in London last November seeking to overturn the Government ban on different-sex civil partnerships arguing that it is unfair because it treats people differently dependent on their sexuality. In contrast recently, Claire Beale and Martin Loat became the first UK-based heterosexual couple to enter into a civil partnership in the British Isles. The catch is the couple had to travel to the Isle of Man for the ceremony. So whilst our British island cousins have made this step toward equality, the Government over here on the mainland are claiming, as they did when Rebecca and Charles first went to the High Court in January and when I first tabled an amendment to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, that such a change would be costly and complicated.
I am not convinced by the Government’s excuses – this change is very straightforward. Just as with same sex civil partnerships, it would not be possible for someone to become a civil partner with a close family member, or if that person was already in a union, and the union would need to be subject to the same termination criteria. All that is required is a simple one-line amendment to the Civil Partnership Act 2004 that my Bill would enact. It could all be done and dusted in Committee by teatime.
In the Government’s original consultation before the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, 61% of respondents were in favour of extending civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples. Alas, for some inexplicable reason, it never made it into the legislation, which would have made it a better and fairer Act.
Aside from the equality question there is a further major practical benefit in opening up civil partnerships to opposite-sex couples: family stability. The Centre for Social Justice has calculated that the cost to this country of family breakdown is some £48 billion, or some 2.5% of gross domestic product. That is a big problem, a growing problem, and a costly problem—costly, both financially and socially, to our society.
Fewer than one in 10 married parents have split up by the time a child reaches the age of five—compared with more than one in three of those who are cohabiting but not married—and 75% of family breakdowns involving children under five result from the separation of unmarried parents. The Centre for Social Justice has produced a raft of statistics showing that a child who is not in a two-parent family is much more likely to fall out of school and 70% more likely to be addicted to drugs, and is more likely to get into trouble with the law, to be homeless, and not to be in employment, education or training. That is not to be judgmental about parents who find themselves having to bring up a child alone through no fault of their own, but two partners make for greater stability.
We know that marriage works, but we also know that civil partnerships are beginning to show evidence of greater stability for same-sex couples, including those who have children, be it through adoption, surrogacy or whatever. There is a strong case for believing that extending civil partnerships would improve that stability for many more families in different ways. If just one in 10 cohabiting opposite-sex couples entered into a civil partnership, that would amount to some 300,000 couples and their children. It would offer the prospect of yet greater security, greater stability, less likelihood of family breakdown, better social outcomes and better financial outcomes. That, surely, is progress.
There is a further application. Many people who have strong religious beliefs—particularly Catholics who have ended up getting divorced, which is in conflict with certain religious teachings—may not be inclined to get married again if they meet a new partner, because their Church supposedly believes that they should be married for life. In many cases, however, they would be able to reconcile that position by entering into a new formal commitment through an opposite-sex civil partnership. So there are a number of practical, real-life scenarios in which civil partnerships for opposite-sex couples could achieve something very positive.
Opposite-sex civil partnerships are not something that has been cooked up in this country. In South Africa, the Civil Union Act 2006 gave same-sex and opposite-sex couples the option to register a civil union by way of a marriage or a civil partnership on the same basis. In France, the pacte civil de solidarité—or PACS, as it is known—was introduced in 1999 as a form of civil union between two adults of the same sex or the opposite sex, and now gay marriage has been added to that. Interestingly, one in 10 PACS has been dissolved in France, while one in three marriages ends in divorce. There is evidence that some of those civil partnerships have created greater stability, whether they are opposite-sex or same-sex partnerships.
If the job of government is to allow people to be as free as possible to make their own decisions without harming the freedom of others, what on earth is it doing failing to make it lawful for people of the opposite sex who happen to love each other enter into a civil partnership when it allows that very same freedom to people of the same sex? The current situation is unfair, illogical and needs to change, and that is exactly what my Bill will do and with minimum fuss.