The House will have a Friday sitting tomorrow to consider Private Members’ Bills. Lord Ashley of Stoke is moving the Second Reading of his Disabled Persons (Independent Living) Bill. The measure is designed to give rights to disabled persons to enable them to live as independently as possible. Lord Lester of Herne Hill is moving his Cohabitation Bill. This has already received some media attention in an article by Frances Gibb in The Times Online section. The purpose of the Bill is to give some rights to cohabiting couples. The rights are not as extensive as those provided for couples who are married or in civil partnerships, but they go further than the present situation under which, if a couple split up, neither has a legal claim on the other. Though it is still common to refer to a ‘common law’ marriage, there is no such thing. As the article in The Times mentions, there is popular support for a change in the law.
The purpose of Private Members’ Bills is usually not to achieve their direct enactment – there is not time to get them through the Commons – but to get a response from Government and demonstrate the case for change. They can perform an important agenda setting role. Very occasionally, they do get passed. Each of the Bills being debated tomorrow has attracted ten or more speakers. The time taken up by the measures is not great and arguably is time well spent, raising issues that deserve to be aired.
Considering Britain already has a reputation as being the divorce shopping capital of Europe due to our courts being more generous in settlements I’d have some concerns that this may only increase this trend.
On the face of it it does seem perverse that you can get maintenance (for a relationship without children) for potentially 1+ year longer than the relationship lasted (2 years -v- 3+ years) There already exist legal mechanisms (clumsy I’ll grant you) for dealing with child maintenance and jointly held businesses. By setting the bar so low as 2 years this seems likely to make otherwise clean if upsetting breaks into more protracted legal arguments to the predictable financial benefit of m’learned friends. If the intent is to catch those in 10/20/30+ year ‘common law marriages’ then I see no problem in the bill being framed sufficiently tightly to do so.
I’m glad to see there is provision for “out-out agreements” in the Cohabitation Bill. I’m in support of legally-binding pre-nuptual agreements for people who are married or in civil partnerships, so to introduce such a Bill covering cohabitation without this provision would be a mistake. However, as it says they must have “separately received legal advice from a qualified practitioner”, it just appears to be to make even more money for lawyers.
I couldn’t agree more about pre-nups. That they are still not legally binding is very strange. Far better for people to think about and agree these things before marriage when relations are good than argue over every comma and full stop when things have potentially become bitter. Opt out systems are always an effective way of ensuring almost everyone gets dragged in as many people will simply not realise they need to opt out, get confused when an on/off relationship potentially crosses the 2 year mark or be too lazy to bother.