Cohabitation Rights Bill [HL]

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to have the opportunity that this Bill offers to put in place protections for those couples who choose not to marry and not to have a civil partnership registration—although I trust that civil partnerships will soon be available to straight couples—but choose simply to live together.

The reasons couples do that are manifold. Not everyone believes in marriage, and some do not want the weight of religious overtones, the male patriarchy or just the mere formality of it. It may be the case that they are religious and have already been married but their religion does not permit divorce. Maybe they had a bad experience previously with the more formal arrangements. Maybe there are financial reasons for a couple to want to live together, particularly given the price of property and renting. Maybe they just want to try cohabiting as a prelude to marriage or civil partnership; maybe parental divorce has led them to distrust marriage; maybe, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, one wants to marry and the other does not.

To be frank, it does not really matter why a couple do not want to take the options of marriage or registration. It is a free country and we are, thank goodness, still free to choose the nature of our relationships. In the end it does not matter what I or any of your Lordships think. We are totally entitled to our views—and we clearly have differing views—but it is not the state’s role to prefer one to another. Although the tone of this debate has been quite moderate, in the previous debate in 2014 there was definitely a heavy effort to make sure that marriage was the gold standard—that it was somehow better than living together, and therefore had protections not available to those who did not make the decision to marry.

It is the state’s job to enable and make lawful arrangements to facilitate loving unions—of our choice—and to ensure protection for the participants and their children. I read the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on this same Bill from 2014, and her concern that there would be less willingness to commit to a long-term relationship and that the stress of couple breakdown added significantly to the detriment of children. It is true that most people desire that lifetime commitment, but it is not the protection in law that delivers it, nor necessarily the form which it takes. We need to face the reality of life as it is, not as we wish it to be.

My own nephew died aged 35 as a result of the contaminated blood scandal. I take this opportunity to say thank goodness for the inquiry now in train. For that, if not for Brexit, Theresa May deserves our thanks and praise for going where previous Governments had refused to go. Nick was 35 and had a 10 month-old daughter. He had been with his partner for 14 years. They did not believe in marriage, and civil partnerships were not available, so in a relationship as loving and faithful and enduring as any marriage, they had no rights in law—no support whatever. So I very much welcome this opportunity to move this issue into law and provide that protection.

As my noble friend mentioned, other parts of the United Kingdom are ahead of us. Scotland has had its cohabitation law since 2006, and other jurisdictions have moved on this, including Canada, New Zealand, Norway and France.

As I said, in the last debate most of the speeches against this very modest measure seemed to focus on the desire to make people marry and stay together as the gold standard and as a safe harbour in which to raise children. We know that there is no such thing; we know about the divorce rate and that children are mistreated in married homes as well as unmarried homes. While we may aspire to live happily ever after, that desire applies to most people in whatever arrangement they choose to live.

The truth is that single-parent families are endemic. I am a single parent myself, and being married did not stop my husband running off with someone younger and less attractive—I could not resist saying that. Around 90% of single parents bringing up families are women, and it really should not make a difference to the responsibility that they shoulder whether theirs was a marriage, a registration or a cohabitation. So, while we may mourn family breakdown, withholding protections for couples who choose cohabitation is not the answer.

My noble friend mentioned the law, which is already lenient in terms of the grounds for divorce. If it is now going post haste towards no-fault divorce, the corollary surely is that you can no longer differentiate in law between modes of coupledom. There will be no special sanctions for ending a marriage. If society at large and we as lawmakers accept that marriage breakdown happens and that you cannot make someone stay, and we—quite rightly—remove the threat of the financial penalty for being the guilty party, surely we cannot then turn to those who cohabit and tell them that their choice is less valid or valuable than the choice of marriage.

Of course it would be better if people were more constant, if men and women never strayed from their partners and if the family unit was in perpetuity. But, as I said, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Our commitment and mission in this House should be to ensure that men, women and children in cohabiting arrangements have protection on the breakdown of those arrangements—and these are the most modest proposals.