Cohabitation Rights Bill [HL]

Lord Bailey of Paddington Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 17th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, listening to the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Marks, has entirely ruined the speech I had prepared. I was about to come heavily down against the Bill, because I come from a very poor community where marriage is almost non-existent and many of our poor social outcomes are related to that fact. But, listening to the way that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, laid out the details gives me some ability to engage in this process and give it another hearing.

I still want to make my point. I declare an interest: I have been married for 21 years. Marriage is the gold standard. The Government tell us that there are now 3.5 million cohabiting couples in the country, that the law must respect modern relationships and that that is why the Government have put this before the House. My worry is the effect that this will have on poorer communities. Marriage has increasingly become the preserve of the better-off part of our community. Some 87% of those in high-income households are married; in the lowest-income households, that figure drops to only 24%. Surely our ambition should be to close the marriage gap, not legislate as if it does not matter.

This debate is not about judging people. I come from a single-parent family. I watched my mother fight tooth and nail every day for the well-being of my brother and I. In fact, she is still expressing her views on every little thing I do to this very day, even though I am 55 years old.

Almost half the teenagers in this country are not living with both their natural parents. This reflects the scale of family instability in our society. This matters, because a secure family is consistently associated with better educational outcomes, better emotional outcomes, and better economic outcomes and life chances for young people. Ian Rowe, who works with disadvantaged young people in New York, teaches what he calls a success sequence: finish school, get a job, marry, have children—I think the last bit is optional. Research shows that following this sequence gives young people a 97% chance of avoiding poverty. For me, that is the function that marriage performs. I come from the community in this country that has the lowest social outcomes, and that is a direct consequence of low instances of marriage.

The noble Lord, Lord Marks, talked powerfully about the cohabiting myth or the common-law marriage myth, but if we weaken the legal uniqueness of marriage then we run the risk of setting up another myth: that you do not need to be married. Marriage provides a powerful social uplift. The sequence that I talked about is not ideology; it is social mobility in action. If we really are interested in boosting outcomes for the poorest communities in this country, we must support marriage, not legislate against it. If we want to tackle inequality, improve social mobility and reduce poverty then our task is to make marriage not less distinctive but more distinctive. It is to make stable, committed family life more achievable for everyone. For that reason, I remain slightly sceptical of the Bill, but I found the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Marks, very powerful and I will engage in the process and see how we can build this in order to support the poorest community and do justice to those who are cohabiting.