Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Baroness Hollis of Heigham Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Knight of Collingtree]

I, too, strongly support what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has said, and I supported the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, in her earlier efforts. It is extremely disappointing to be told, “Not now, another time” or, “Not tomorrow” or, “In a little while”. How do we know that it is going to be a little while? We have no idea. Reviews do not normally take a little while and even then they may not be successful.

I do not doubt the sincerity of the noble Lord, Lord Alli, and his genuine support for the idea behind this, but we are told every time, “Yes, we agree with what you say but this is not the vehicle in which to do it”. What we need to be told is, if this is not, what is? We need some idea of that because the injustices mount as the years go by. Many people, who would have been helped if the original amendment had gone through, are now gone. They are dead, finished; they faced burdens which they need not have faced. I, for one, am not prepared to sit here year after year and hear, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow”. Tomorrow never comes.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, nine years ago I took part in this debate, as did many others in your Lordships’ House. I was deeply moved then, as was the noble Lord, Lord Alli, by the cases and arguments put by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, which were repeated so eloquently today by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech.

I agreed absolutely that we need to address the problem of inheritance for people—they may be sisters or may not even be blood relatives—who none the less share a home for a long time and then face the problem of an inheritance tax which could push them into the shadows of residential care. I absolutely accept that that must be addressed. I hoped at the time we argued this, and still hope, that this should be addressed by the Treasury agreeing, very simply—it does not need legislation—that you can roll up inheritance tax on the first death to the death of the second person. As I understand it, that is all one needs to do. The state is not denied any money, but the sibling or carer who is left does not have the threat of losing their home held over them. That is the way to go. When it comes to extending or even considering this as part of an extension of civil partnerships, I obviously have no problem with this being part of a review, but I had two fundamental objections nine years ago and they remain for me today to consider this as possibly an extension of the civil partnership.

First, a civil partnership has a legal entry and a legal exit, which is equivalent to divorce. Take, for example, a mother and daughter who enter into a civil partnership, in good faith, partly to protect the home. The daughter may be in her forties or fifties; her mother dies, she inherits and is protected. If she is in a civil partnership and five years down the line meets a man whom she chooses to marry, she has to divorce her mother—her civil partner—to enter into a new marriage with a man. She may alternatively decide that when her mother has died and that civil partnership has ended she will form another civil partnership with her own grown-up son. Therefore the property cascades down the generations without ever touching the Treasury at any point.

This can be done through a revision of inheritance tax. It cannot in my view be done through a civil partnership which has to be divorced before you can enter another one or, indeed, before you enter a marriage. The notion that a daughter can divorce a mother in order to marry somebody else, or that a sister and brother can divorce each other because they each wish to marry someone else brings the notion of civil partnership, its ceremonies of entering and its divorce, into disrepute.

The second problem, which is why I was engaged fairly heavily the last time round, is that you cannot separate inheritance advantages from social security liability. If two people, whether they are a carer and the person cared for, a mother and a daughter, or a brother and a sister, enter a civil partnership in the hope of avoiding or postponing inheritance tax, they take on mutual responsibility for each other in social security. That means, for example, that if a frail elderly mother and a son enter a civil partnership to spare the son a big inheritance tax bill, he becomes wholly financially responsible for his mother, if he can afford it. For the first time ever, he will be means-tested for his mother’s support; his mother will have no independent rights to social security benefits because she will be his dependant. If he can afford to pay for her, the state does not need to. She loses her independence of social security income because the son, by virtue of the civil partnership, has taken on that responsibility.

I could enlarge on that, but noble Lords can see the consequences. If a sister and a brother enter into a civil partnership, then they become mutually financially responsible for each other in social security terms, including children and the like. The problem is that one cannot separate out the upside, in terms of inheritance law, for carers, or for a mother and a daughter or for sisters, without taking on, in all fairness, the downside of responsibility for social security.

I suggest to your Lordships that for every couple who gain through inheritance, there will be three or five poorer people, with no wealth to enjoy at inheritance and who have fairly modest incomes now, who will be losers. I do not think your Lordships would want that to happen. All I suggest is that noble Lords review and press to review the situation of inheritance tax and the ability to roll it up. In that way I think that we address the problem.

[Lord Cormack]

Does the noble Baroness not accept that we are not suggesting that where these other relationships exist a civil partnership is compulsory? Her whole argument is based on the assumption that it is compulsory.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

My Lords, if there is to be a relationship recognised as an extension of the concept of civil partnerships for inheritance tax, it also produces a responsibility for mutual financial support called social security. The one goes with the other. The way around it is something that I think my Government should have explored, and that I hope the current coalition Government will explore; the noble Baroness, Lady Knight of Collingtree, was absolutely right about this. We should see a way of avoiding a survivor, particularly in the case of the two elderly sisters who went to the courts, having the inheritance abated on the first person and being rolled over to the second death. That seems to me to protect the position of the two sisters, which I think we were all deeply moved by, but would avoid the long-term problem of social security which would otherwise follow.

[Baroness Deech]

I think that the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, have misunderstood my point. Of course there would be no question of making anybody enter any sort of contract of union. I am sure they would sit down and work out whether it was worth doing because of inheritance tax, and then of course they would—and should—happily take on the duty of supporting each other. However, if they do not want to, and they want their benefits, then that is it; there is no question of dropping this on them without their consent. There would have to be some sort of formality.