Asked by: Sarah Wollaston (Liberal Democrat - Totnes)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what plans he has to bring forward legislative proposals to amend section 14 of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 to give legal recognition to humanist marriages before waiting for the outcome of the Law Commission’s review.
Answered by Wendy Morton - Shadow Minister (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
The Law Commission review that the Government announced this June is a fundamental review of the law on how and where people can legally marry in England and Wales. As part of that review, the Government invited the Law Commission to make recommendations about how marriage by humanist and other non-religious belief organisations could be incorporated into a revised or new scheme for all marriages that is simple, fair and consistent.
Asked by: Sarah Wollaston (Liberal Democrat - Totnes)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, for what reasons the Law Commission is undertaking a review into humanist marriages.
Answered by Wendy Morton - Shadow Minister (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
The Law Commission review that the Government announced this June is a fundamental review of the law on how and where people can legally marry in England and Wales. The law has been added to over several centuries without any systematic reform.
As part of that review, the Government invited the Law Commission to make recommendations about how marriage by humanist and other non-religious belief organisations could be incorporated into a revised or new scheme for all marriages that is simple, fair and consistent.
The Law Commission has published the terms of reference for the review at https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/weddings/.
Asked by: Sarah Wollaston (Liberal Democrat - Totnes)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what funding has been allocated to the Law Commission review of the law on marriage.
Answered by Wendy Morton - Shadow Minister (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
The Law Commission will review the law on how and where people can marry in England and Wales, and will provide recommendations for a simple, fair and consistent system which gives couples choice in to marry in a way that is meaningful to them. The cost of this project will be approximately £400,000.
This cost is for the resource for two years of a project team made up of one full-time lawyer, one full-time research assistant, a proportion of the time of a team manager and some travel, publication and translation costs (totalling approximately £150,000 per year) plus the cost of engaging a specialist academic (£50,000 per year).
Asked by: Sarah Wollaston (Liberal Democrat - Totnes)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the probate system.
Answered by Paul Maynard
Waiting times in the probate service have recently increased. However, following urgent action by the courts service, they are now starting to improve.
The temporary delays were the result of more work coming into the system and the impact of the initial move to a new IT system for managing probate work.
Now that move is complete, and the unusually high workload has been dealt with, we expect waiting times to continue to improve – and be back to normal levels in the coming weeks.
Asked by: Sarah Wollaston (Liberal Democrat - Totnes)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department and HM Prison and Probation Service are taking to speed up security clearance for health and social care staff commencing employment in prisons.
Answered by Rory Stewart
The last year has seen a significant increase in the level of recruitment with a target of deploying an additional 2,500 prison officers in post by the end of 2018. This has impacted the overall volume of cases handled by our shared services provider, due to significant increases in the number of applications handled. This has resulted in backlogs in processing across all of the business.
The right balance needs to be struck between having staff appropriately security cleared and the speed at which they can begin employment with HMPPS. Steps have been taken to review the whole recruitment end-to-end procedure to look at the points in which delays have or can take place. Action has been taken to address these and the backlog of cases has been reduced significantly from last year. This in turn, has also resulted in speedier processing times in security vetting for all staff.