My Lords, these regulations amend the Marriage Act 1949 to enable the introduction of a schedule-based system for the registration of marriages in England and Wales, which will reform the way in which marriages are registered in the future.
Couples will sign a marriage schedule at their marriage ceremony instead of a paper marriage register, and all marriages will be registered by registration officers in a single electronic marriage register. For marriages taking place in the Church of England or the Church in Wales, after ecclesiastical preliminaries an equivalent document called a “marriage document” will be issued. This will remove the requirement for the 84,000 paper registers currently in use in register offices and around 30,000 religious buildings.
It should be noted that a schedule system is already in place in Scotland—this has been the case since 1855 —and in Northern Ireland. When civil partnerships were introduced in England and Wales in 2005, the opportunity was taken to modernise the registration process and use a schedule-based system. Civil partnerships have always been registered in an electronic register.
Modernising the registration process facilitates updating the marriage entry to allow for the details of both parents of the couple to be recorded instead of just the father’s name and occupation, as is currently the case. Moving to a schedule-based system is the most cost-effective way to achieve this change and will make the system of registration more secure and efficient.
The regulations amend the seldom-used Marriage of British Subjects (Facilities) Acts 1915 and 1916 so that they no longer apply in England and Wales. The regulations also make a consequential amendment under Section 5 of the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 to amend the Marriage Act to specify the evidence that must be provided by an individual when giving notice of a marriage for immigration purposes. I beg to move.
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