Cohabitation Rights Bill [HL]

Baroness Gohir Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gohir (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill and thank the noble Lord, Lord Marks, for introducing it. The Bill would provide important legal protections for many financially vulnerable people in cohabiting relationships. It would benefit women in religious-only marriages, so I am going to focus my comments on Muslim women.

Around 25% of Muslim women are in marriages that are not legally recognised because they have undergone a religious ceremony in the UK and have not had the additional civil marriage, often through no choice of their own. I declare an interest, as that figure is from the Muslim Women’s Network helpline, and is from 11 years-worth of data.

I want to pick up on a point that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, mentioned about spouses arriving from abroad. I point out that for any spouse who arrives from abroad, if their marriage is registered abroad according to the laws of that land, it would be recognised as being a legally valid marriage.

Through our helpline, we have seen the devastating consequences of the legal gap. Women who have been in a religious marriage for many years, sometimes decades, can find themselves homeless overnight when that relationship ends, with no legal right to the family home or financial provision. That situation is often compounded when women have given up their careers to become homemakers, have been subjected to domestic, financial and economic abuse, and have not been able to build up their own savings or have their own income. Some are older women whose husbands have simply decided that they want a younger partner and feel that they can discard their wife without any accountability. During the Covid pandemic, we supported women whose husbands died unexpectedly. Since their marriages were not legally recognised, there were cases where they were evicted from their home by adult children who asserted legal ownership of the property. For these reasons, I strongly welcome the legal and financial protections this Bill would provide.

However, I believe the Bill needs further clarity on how it would operate where an individual maintains more than one household. For example, a person may remain legally married but separated, begin a cohabiting relationship with another partner and then that second relationship breaks down. In other cases, some individuals live with two different partners at separate addresses, with neither partner being aware of the other as the person spends long periods of their working life away from home. Within some Muslim communities, there have been cases where a man is legally married to one woman through a civil marriage and then enters into a religious-only marriage with another woman. How would competing claims be resolved? Clarity is also needed on whether the Bill would apply irrespective of a person’s immigration status, particularly for those with insecure immigration status, who are often most vulnerable to financial and relationship exploitation.

Finally, I welcome that the Bill provides a safety net but does not place cohabitation on an equal footing to civil marriage.