Cohabitation Rights Bill [HL]

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, the debate has been thoughtful and civil. It is nice to be able to say that, not least in the light of the earlier debate and others here and in other places. The noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, is probably woman of the match for her comments and revelations but, none the less, there is still an element of otherworldliness to our discussion. I am sorry to say it but the elephant in the room is the complete obliteration of civil legal aid, including in family law cases over recent years. People say that talk is cheap, but legislation without the fiscal changes described is only a little more expensive. Family legal aid is in complete crisis, with a minority of people in family cases getting access to advice and representation. Moreover, family courts are under strain, and that is the case even when people have chosen to get married, let alone getting into the territory where people have not.

I do not doubt the good and benign intentions behind the Bill but I cannot help but think that the method of execution slightly misses the target. As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and others have pointed out very kindly, the Bill places obligations on people who did not choose them. What is more, it does so on those who may have actively chosen not to take them on, including some women. It is easy to gender this issue but it could place obligations on women, including those who are in a second or third relationship, quite possibly with adult or dependent children. They could be caught just as easily by the need to pay out in a relationship that they have chosen not to make legal or financial. That really needs to be borne in mind.

I take seriously the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, about generational injustice and children being the priority. It would be one thing if this Bill had been targeted on protecting children or adding to the protections for the children of a cohabiting relationship. However, what it seems to do is place, if not the full panoply of marriage rights, nevertheless quasi-marital rights on people who have chosen not to take them on, in an age when we are quite rightly moving towards expanding the nature of marriage to include same-sex partners and so on. That needs to be considered. As the end of the magical and arbitrary three-year period looms, as the Bill stands, it would put pressure on people who have chosen a slightly more fluid arrangement than marriage or civil partnership either to opt out and pay a lawyer because they are not going to get legal aid—the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, pointed out that this is about relatively small sums of money, but they will have to pay a lawyer, which is quite a red flag in an embryonic relationship anyway—or perhaps they will have to split up and thus avoid the regime. I cannot believe that that hits the target of protecting the vulnerable and I cannot believe that that is the intention that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, is trying to promote. Moreover, it will of course mean more work for courts that are already under strain. It is very easy, in this wonderful and otherworldly place, to salve our consciences and signal virtue by creating more and more intricate, byzantine rights and obligations which applications to the courts will sort out, but the courts are under strain.

For all its noble intentions, the Bill or something like it might work if proper legal aid and publicly funded legal education were in place. It is all very well to talk about the ignorance of the majority, but we must be a little careful about language like that. We need to fund education, advice and reputation for the majority. Equally, with such provision, a Bill such as this might not be needed. I hope that I will be forgiven for saying that the Bill in its current form at this time slightly misses the target.