Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration Etc.) Bill

Baroness Barker Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 18th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, for the way in which she introduced this Bill, which deals with matters of enormous importance and sensitivity to a very small number of people. I am delighted to speak today not least because my father married a lot of people. He was a nonconformist minister, and I must tell your Lordships that the day on which the Church of England took a more enlightened view towards the remarriage of divorced people was a cause of great sadness in our household.

Turning to Clause 1, in 2016, I was absolutely delighted to get married in a beautiful chapel—it was medieval and deconsecrated, I have to say—but it was none the less a wonderful day. During the preparations, my wife and I had to see the registrar, and we all concluded that the fact that we had to tell the registrar who our fathers were but not our mothers was simply and utterly anachronistic.

I am also indebted to my dad for reasons why we should accept the Bill today. Many years ago, my father was officiating at a wedding in Glasgow University Chapel. In fact, it was the wedding of some family friends. When he took the couple out to sign the register, they turned to the groom’s mother, who was in fact a professional registrar—and she had forgotten the certificate. So my father and mother had to disappear from the reception to go and get it so they could be married. Until today, few people knew that the pictures of the happy couple are in fact of them signing a bit of blotting paper for the purpose. So it is high time that we leap forward with tech and make the changes to the schedules outlined in Clause 1.

Turning to Clause 2 and civil partnerships, there has been a huge debate about why, given that gay people are now allowed to be married and we have civil marriage, we need equal civil partnership. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, not least because my dad often married people in church and had to think carefully about whether that was the most appropriate thing to do. He had the right to refuse to marry people—it was a right that he exercised sparingly, but he did think about it. Back in those days, he thought that there were times when it was not appropriate for people have their ceremonies in church.

On the question of civil partnership, I am greatly indebted to friends of mine. I am thinking in particular of one person who at a very young age was party to a violent and traumatic marriage. She managed to escape from that and subsequently spent more than 30 years with another man whom she loved deeply, but the idea of entering into something called marriage was absolutely not right. That is no reflection on the value of their relationship, and for her, a civil partnership would have been highly appropriate. I am indebted to her for getting in touch with me last night. When I told her that we were going to be discussing this, she said, “Look, there is a point in this. People who talk about marriage frequently talk about it being a union of two people. I do not disagree with that at all, but for me, the fact we are talking about a civil partnership—a partnership of two people who are interdependent rather than dependent on each other—is extremely important”. She, other friends of mine and others who are a part of the campaign for equal civil partnership have often talked about that point.

I too want to talk about this in the context of the role of religions. I have spent a lifetime observing and wandering around the religious sensibilities of other people. Through all the arguments we had about civil partnership and same-sex marriage, time and again opponents were quick to throw at us the accusation that somehow this was undermining marriage as it is understood by the religious bodies in this country.

No one ever recognised the fact that sometimes, a person falls in love with someone who is not of the faith into which they were born, and part of the process of managing their relationship with their family is that they do not get married. Until now, if those people are heterosexual, there has been no way to enter into a legal commitment with their partner while at the same time juggling sensitivities with their family. This is therefore an important step forward.

Later, we will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, why we should extend civil partnerships to people who are from the same family, because of the issue of tenancies and property. It is not news to him that I oppose that. I believe it is wholly wrong to take a body of legislation designed to apply to adults who, of their own volition, come together to form a family unit and apply it to relationships which are consanguineous and cannot be broken. I agree with him that there is an anomaly in our fiscal law that needs to be sorted, but our fiscal law already makes allowances for children. Those who have children’s best interests at heart should go down that route and desist from this campaign, founded and funded by evangelical Christians, to have a go at civil partnerships and same-sex marriage. We are talking about two completely different things.

I will leave it to my noble friend Lady Benjamin to talk—far more eloquently than I could—about the registration of pregnancies that cease before 24 weeks, but I believe that if we can show greater understanding and humanity to people who undergo that trauma, we should.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, is right that the involvement of coroners is a complicated subject, not least because we would not want to do anything to undermine in any way the duty of candour of obstetricians and gynaecologists in an extremely difficult area of medicine. I think I am right in saying that the largest proportion of liability claims against the NHS are to do with perinatal medicine and what happens during birth, which is one of the most complicated and dangerous areas of medicine. The noble Baroness is right to raise this subject but I do not think that we are quite there yet.

Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, I think that Clause 2 needs more work. Most people think there is a need for greater consultation but nobody wants to drag this out any longer, if possible. As when we were working on the original civil partnerships and same-sex marriage legislation, there are couples for whom the need to sort out their affairs is urgent. Nevertheless, more detail is needed.

Finally, I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Collins. I am pleased to say that in this country, we are still making progress in this area of social reform. It is absolutely wrong that the citizens of Northern Ireland remain set in some 1950s view of the world that no longer pertains to their lives, and it is absolutely wrong that some of our country’s citizens do not enjoy the same status as the rest. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, and Tim Loughton for his persistence in moving forward on this issue. I hope that we can achieve consensus today and get this on to the statute book as soon as possible.