My Lords, this is undoubtedly an important piece of legislation, and we are indebted to my noble friend Lady Hodgson of Abinger for explaining its various aims and purposes to us with her customary clarity. A tribute has rightly been paid to the Bill’s progenitor, Mr Loughton, who so skilfully secured its passage through the Commons, showing tenacity and resolve during the considerable period in which it was under discussion.
I must thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, for her trailer. We are, sadly, at odds over the main point that I will be addressing—the position of sibling couples—but we are not at odds over everything. I am at one with her and with the noble Lords, Lord Collins
and Lord Cashman, and my noble friend Lord Hayward about the extension of same-sex marriage to Northern Ireland. I have endorsed its extension on a number of occasions in this House over the last few years. As a unionist, I feel very strongly that a common core of human rights should be applicable in all parts of our country. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, and I were on the point of commissioning from a mutual friend of ours, a great expert at York University, a short Private Member’s Bill when Mr McGinn MP and my noble friend Lord Hayward came forward with their Bill, which I very much look forward to supporting at every conceivable opportunity.
As regards this Bill, I shall confine my remarks to Clause 2, which would permit opposite-sex couples to enter into civil partnerships instead of marriages, if that is their wish. A long campaign has been conducted to achieve this major change. All those who have participated in the campaign, and the many opposite-sex couples who look forward to entering into the kind of legal relationship that they want for themselves, will rejoice at the further progress that the Bill is making today. I look forward particularly to hearing the Government’s position.
A consultation exercise on the extension of civil partnerships is to be held this year, as my noble friend Lady Williams of Trafford confirmed in a Written Answer to me recently. No doubt she will give details of when the exercise will start and finish, and tell us what will happen after it has been concluded, when she comes to reply to this debate. We need to be clear too about whether the Government intend to keep to their original commitment to hold a full public consultation. That is what is needed so that all those who would like to become entitled to civil partnerships can make representations and have their claims assessed, but perhaps the Government have now backtracked and propose to confine the consultation to the legal technicalities of bringing opposite-sex couples within the scope of civil partnerships. I look forward to hearing the details.
I have a simple question to pose in this debate. Now that the extension of civil partnerships beyond same-sex couples has been accepted in principle, have all the appropriate additional criteria for eligibility been included in this important Bill before us today?
For my part, I have for years backed wholeheartedly the widespread view that, by one means or another, eligibility should be extended further so that sibling couples, committed to one another in secure, platonic, long-term cohabiting partnerships, symbolised by the home they have created together, can come within its scope. It is a view that first found strong backing in this House in 2004, when an amendment to include cohabiting family members in what became the Civil Partnership Act was passed, but the Labour majority in the Commons declined to accept it. A clear majority of Conservatives were in favour—something that should be remembered today.
Since 2004, support for the legal recognition of sibling couples has always been present in both Houses. It was expressed most conspicuously on 20 July last year, when my Civil Partnership Act 2004 (Amendment) (Sibling Couples) Bill was given an unopposed Second
Reading in this House. The detailed arguments in favour of it were powerfully reinforced by speeches from the Cross Benches, as well as from elsewhere.
A very important point was made from the Cross Benches in that debate by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, who has been tireless over the years in seeking to extend the rights provided by civil partnerships to cohabiting family members. Referring to the Supreme Court ruling which gave this Bill added urgency, she said:
“If civil partnerships are to be extended to heterosexual couples by virtue of … Article 14”,
of the European Convention on Human Rights,
“the same must be true of sibling couples”.—[Official Report, 20/7/18; col. 1404.]
Two of the House’s leading lawyers, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who could not be present for the debate in July, made clear their full support for the Bill. My Bill would authorise civil partnerships between siblings over 30 years of age who have cohabited in shared property for at least 12 years. It awaits a Committee stage, which it deserves but will not get because the Government will not provide time for it.
The Bill before us today highlights once again the injustice suffered for so long by sibling couples who have decided to make their lives together in homes that are their proud, shared possessions, filled with the memories of two platonically entwined lives. That is the inevitable consequence of extending legal rights to some couples in the form that they want them, while ignoring the just claims of other couples who are so badly in need of them, and in exactly the same form, to protect their common interests.
A crucial point arises here. Civil partnerships were introduced for the express purpose of conferring legal rights on couples who were ineligible to marry. Now the plan is to extend them to all those who possess the right to marry while denying them only to couples who cannot marry. It does not make sense. No one even attempts to argue that denying all legal rights to cohabiting siblings is defensible; yet whenever the issue comes up, government Ministers and other short-sighted politicians everywhere say that this is not the time, the place or the right piece of legislation to address it. This must stop. It is hard to think of anything better suited to dealing with this issue than a Bill to change the nature and purpose of civil partnerships by extending them beyond those for whom they were originally intended.
Let us not mince words about a supposedly overwhelming obstacle to using civil partnerships to bring justice to sibling couples. Delicately and coyly, we are told that civil partnerships are for only those in intimate relationships. Others, like sibling couples, who are living chaste lives together, cannot have a civil partnership. There must be sex. This is a complete canard. There is nothing in the 2004 Act which makes sex a prerequisite. Church of England clergy are allowed to form civil partnerships on the understanding that the couple will go separately to bed.
It is difficult to forgive the indifference shown by a Conservative Government to sibling couples. Their values are Tory values, and the Government should
not be perpetuating discrimination against them. They should be celebrating and applauding the contribution made by devoted cohabiting partners to the well-being of society. Cohabiting partners save the state the cost of social care: they release housing by setting up home together and often look after elderly relatives and children.
Undertaking such responsibilities and providing unbroken mutual support entitles them to the legal rights of civil partners, particularly joint tax allowances, joint pension rights and the deferral of inheritance tax. Many sibling couples have been in touch with me. All are worried, many in despair, about the probable loss of a joint home when the first sibling dies, because of the real risk that the survivor will have to sell up to raise the means to meet an inheritance tax bill—and at a time of deep personal distress. I referred earlier to the constant support given by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, to the claims of sibling couples. On several occasions, she has been told that deferral of inheritance tax until after the second death must be for only those who have made a legal, binding commitment to each other in the form of a marriage or a civil partnership.
Sibling couples are shut out from civil partnerships because of official insistence that there must be an intimate couple relationship—in other words, sex—for which there is no legal requirement at all. Has discrimination ever been more blatant? The former Attorney-General, Dominic Grieve, whose words I have quoted before, has expressed perfectly the reasons why change must be made:
“The basis for creating civil partnerships is the recognition by government of the value of close, mutually supportive relationships outside traditional marriage. As such the exclusion of cohabiting blood relations from the right to form one is discriminatory and a serious mistake that needs to be corrected”.
I come back to the question of whether this Bill does all that is needed to extend eligibility for civil partnerships. It does not remove the discrimination suffered by sibling couples. The law on civil partnerships will not be in a truly satisfactory state until sibling couples are brought within it.
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