THE Government has a soothing line about its plan to extend the legal benefits of marriage to couples who never married: do not worry, it will not put anyone off marrying. That promise, that the reform will not weaken marriage, turns out to rest, in the consultation’s own pages, on a single footnote. Read the footnote, and you find the Government citing the reform’s own champions.
Start with what is proposed. David Lammy – Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, who signs the consultation’s foreword – wants couples who have lived together for three years, or who simply have a child, to be given marriage-equivalent financial rights: a claim on property when they separate and, when one partner dies, inheritance identical to a husband or wife, applied automatically unless they take formal legal steps to opt out. The contradiction sits in plain sight. The consultation insists it is protecting marriage, even listing ‘Preserving the distinct status of marriage’ among its guiding principles, yet in the same breath says the Government is ‘minded’ to give a surviving cohabitant exactly what a spouse would receive, the same share and the same priority, having weighed a narrower option and rejected it for full equivalence. You do not preserve the distinct status of marriage by abolishing it on death.
Which brings us back to that footnote. When ministers promise the change will not weaken marriage, the evidence is footnote 29, and it offers two sources, neither of them independent. One is a 2006 study co-authored by a long-standing advocate of cohabitation reform, who argues that reform ‘should be a priority for government’. It is built on Australian and European data, not on anything from this country. The other, from 2023, openly welcomes the planned reform, asking only what the change ‘might look like’, not whether it is safe. The Government, in short, is citing the reform’s own supporters to prove the reform harmless.
And it is, in any case, the wrong question. ‘No evidence that reform reduced marriage rates’ is not evidence that marriage is unharmed; it is the absence of a finding. Falling marriage rates were never the real worry. The danger is quieter: hand a couple the rewards of marriage without their ever having to marry, and you remove the reason to marry at all. A reform that drains marriage of its purpose while leaving it standing in name would never announce itself as a sudden fall in a statistic.
Nor is this the gentle act of fairness it claims to be. The Government’s own impact assessment scores the cohabitation changes as a net cost of around £39million and assumes some 6,700 new cohabitation court cases every year. A measure sold as sparing families the courtroom is, on the Government’s own arithmetic, budgeted to fill it.
The public is not convinced. New polling from the Family Education Trust finds that eight in ten people believe these reforms would lead to fewer marriages.
This matters most for children. By the age of five, 15 per cent of children of married parents have seen them separate, against 53 per cent of children of cohabiting parents. Marriage remains the most stable home we know in which to raise a child. A reform designed to blur it away does children no favours, whatever its good intentions.
We have seen where this road leads. Scotland introduced a deliberately modest cohabitation scheme two decades ago; researchers later found couples had been ‘statutorily opted in’ to legal obligations without ever knowing it, and Scotland’s law commission has since urged that the scheme be widened. Every parallel status follows the same arc: introduced as limited, attacked as too narrow, then expanded.
The democratic mandate for any of this is thin. Ministers call it a manifesto promise, but the manifesto pledged only to ‘strengthen the rights and protections available to women in co-habiting couples’, as part of tackling violence against women and girls. That is a world away from rewriting inheritance for every unmarried couple in the land.
None of this means the hardship a cohabiting partner can face when a relationship ends, or a loved one dies, is not real. It is. But the honest answer is not to build a parallel marriage for those who declined the real one. It is to tell people the truth about the law, to encourage marriage, and to remind anyone who wishes to provide for a partner that they can do so today by making a will. You do not uphold marriage by building its replacement.
The consultation is open until 11.59pm on August 14 2026. Anyone who believes marriage is still worth defending should respond and say so.
