Cohabitation Rights Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2019-03-15
Topic: Civil Rights
Alastair Cooke (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I shall be relatively brief, for I have just one specific, though very important, issue to raise I have spoken on many occasions in this House about the urgent need for legal rights to be conferred on family members, particularly siblings, who choose to live together in adulthood, sharing their lives in committed, platonic relationships which in many cases endure until death. They remain scandalously unprotected by existing law, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has also emphasised on many occasions Denied the option to form civil partnerships—though, contrary to widespread belief, there is nothing in the civil partnerships legislation to say that any sexual element is needed—they are denied all the rights that both married couples and civil partners enjoy. Yet cohabiting couples who are related by blood are no less likely to be either financially or emotionally interdependent than those whose union is sexual The hardships that must be borne by those who live together in a relationship based on family ties range from the denial of shared income tax allowances and pension rights to complications with passing on rented tenancies after the death of the first cohabitant and the denial of the spousal exemption from inheritance tax. Without the last of these, many cohabiting family members who bought their homes jointly decades ago, when property was comparatively cheap, face old age with the anxiety of knowing that they may be forced to sell the home, with all its much-loved associations, to raise inheritance tax when the first member of the couple dies Some of the provisions of the Bill before the House today—the right to have an insurable interest in the life of a partner, the right to succeed to a partner’s estate under intestacy rules, and so on—would be of the greatest value to cohabiting siblings and other family members who pair up, whether as companions through life or, as is frequently the case, as carers of an elderly relative. So I ask: why should they be excluded from this Bill simply because their relationship is platonic? Why single out for discrimination the only group of people left who have no access, through any means, to any legal rights and are crying out for them? Why assume that the only kind of relationship worthy of legal protection should be one based on sex, when two family members living together in adulthood in the way I have described so obviously represent a social good The Government are soon to extend the right to form civil partnerships to opposite- sex couples. Those who cohabit but are closely related by blood will, shamefully, continue to be excluded from all the attendant rights. Last month, during the passage of the Bill that will bring about the extension of civil partnerships, I said that committed, long-term cohabiting siblings look on with anger and astonishment as the Government continue to do nothing to relieve them of the constant anxieties they endure in the absence of joint legal rights This Bill, with its specific insistence that those within the prohibited degrees are to be excluded from its provisions, is inevitably a disappointment to cohabiting family members. It could have been a golden opportunity to put things in a better state for cohabiting family members, who deserve parliamentary and governmental action to remove the discrimination under which they have laboured for so long. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Marks, for whom I have high regard, to reconsider the exclusion of family members from the scope of the Bill.