Civil Partnership Act 2004 (Amendment) (Sibling Couples) Bill [HL]

Lord True Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 20th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I need not detain your Lordships for too long. Certainly, I will not be tempted down the road of unanswered correspondence. I am sure that there are many Members of the House who could tell tales, as I could, of letters sent to government departments that have not been acknowledged. I believe that Whitehall is developing a progressive incapacity to answer something as traditional, civil and thought-out as a letter.

Perhaps I might praise my noble friend Lord Lexden. He, along with others, including the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, took up this cause many years ago, but today he expressed his absolutely compelling case with all the humanity, penetrating logic and clarity that have made him my admired and respected friend for half a lifetime. I hope that his voice will be heard and I am here to declare my support, along with those who have spoken and will speak.

Society today is increasingly atomised. We surely need to honour and sustain those affinities that bind it together—and none across the centuries, as my noble friend said, has been greater than the family. Great, if sometimes halting, advances have been made—rightly so—in respect of the rights of those born strangers who later come together and choose to form a relationship of marriage, or now of civil partnership. Their status is rightly acknowledged. Their rights are enshrined in the laws of welfare, taxation, tenancy succession and inheritance. But this is not true of the rights of those who have a lifelong affinity by reason of blood. They may be protected in part by the laws of intestacy—but those laws are blind as between Goneril, Regan and Cordelia.

The invisible role of familial partners—and not only siblings, for I would go further in time than my noble friend to embrace those across generations who elect to care for each other and who very often at the end of their life become not just partners but carers—is a remarkable and cohesive force in society. Love, as my noble friend said, is not expressed only in the conjugal act. The love of two family members who care for each other, who share their home and all their worldly goods, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, surely merits the recognition of society.

As a councillor for a generation or so in an area of exceptionally high land values, I came to know many people who were capital rich but income poor. I could tell many tales, but one of the most distressing cases was similar to those to which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, referred. It was that of sisters, former teachers, who had lived their lives in their parents’ home and, when the older one died, after many years of frailty during which she had been cared for by her sister, that sister, after more than 70 years in her home, found herself forced out and away from all her memories and familiarity by inheritance tax. I could do nothing about that profound injustice and I will not name those concerned, to spare the distress that has been suffered by the surviving sister. This should not happen.

Equally, we know of many people, daughters and sons, who care for elderly parents, who have lived with them for many years—often all their lives in the same house—who face the same insecurity. I think of a widow I see every day, who has moved into a tenancy to care for her mother but who feels insecure as to her succession rights when the head tenant dies. Security in this case is guaranteed—and rightly so—to civil partners. But elective familial relationships of this kind involve sacrifice, and often they close the door to other forms of affinity.

Pushing my noble friend’s case wider to intergenerational carers would perhaps complicate the matter. I have the honour of chairing your Lordships’ committee on intergenerational fairness and I would be interested to hear evidence in relation to that from people who have been affected. But to press that today would muddy the simple—and I think all of us who heard it would say, unanswerable—case that my noble friend made on equity for sibling couples.

A civil society should privilege that true affinity and partnership that spares it many burdens of costs and care that would otherwise fall on others. A civil society should honour the deep affinity of so many sibling couples who give us, just as they give each other, so much by their gift of lifelong love.