Marriage Registration Certificates

Christina Rees Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered marriage registration certificates.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. The latest intelligence that I heard is that we might have a vote at 2.45 pm, but of course we are on a running three-line Whip, so we will just have to see.

I am happy to have secured a Westminster Hall debate on this important subject. Since 1837—the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign—marriage certificates in England and Wales have included the names of the spouses’ fathers, but not their mothers. I know that I am not alone in finding this state of affairs unacceptable in our modern society. Indeed, the Prime Minister said as much in August 2014.

The issue has attracted calls for reform from many Members: the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) has tabled two early-day motions on the subject, each of which attracted 100 signatures; a petition on change.org was signed by more than 70,000 members of the public; and the hon. Member for Neath (Christina Rees) has introduced a private Member’s Bill in an attempt to secure the inclusion of mothers’ names on marriage certificates. I believe that the Second Reading of that Bill is scheduled for 22 January, and it underlines the point that this is clearly an issue that concerns Members from across the House and requires urgent attention and reform.

The Church of England recently held an internal consultation exercise of archdeacons and legal officials to gauge the views of the clergy about changing the way we do marriage registration. It received an overwhelmingly positive response. It cannot be that difficult to change the format of marriage certificates so that the mothers’ details can be captured, can it?

I understand that the problem lies with the practicalities of the current system of marriage registration, which has not changed since 1837. Marriages are registered in register books, which are held in churches and other religious premises as well as in register offices. There are around 84,000 open register books in more than 30,000 churches and religious buildings. Marriage certificates are simply an exact copy of the marriage register entry, so under the current registration system changing the content of the marriage certificate would mean first changing the content of the register books. In order to do that, all 84,000 books currently in circulation would need to be replaced, at a cost of around £3 million.

[Christina Rees (Neath) (Lab)]

I am well aware that that is one of the sticking points, but as the right hon. Lady will be aware, there is a space next to where the details are recorded, which could be used to record the mother’s details without the need to replace all the books.

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[Christina Rees (Neath) (Lab)]

I am delighted that the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) has secured this debate. As has been pointed out, I presented a private Member’s Bill on 4 November to change the marriage certificate in England and Wales, and notwithstanding the now-abandoned rule against anticipation, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this important matter.

I presented the Bill on 4 November, so I assume that all those here will have had ample time to read it. It is not a long Bill, and its beauty is in its simplicity; it makes necessary changes without overcomplicating the situation. The Bill would amend the Marriage Act 1949 and the Civil Partnership Act 2004 to make provision for the recording of the name and occupation of the mother of each party to a marriage or civil partnership for registration purposes, and to require such information to be displayed on marriage certificates and civil partnership certificates and for connected purposes in England and Wales. It would cement those requirements in primary legislation, which is important.

[Valerie Vaz]

My hon. Friend is making an important point about the Bill that she introduced. Does she agree that it is a matter for the Government to discuss the details of the Bill, just as elements of my 10-minute rule Bill have been accepted into primary legislation? Points made by the Second Church Estates Commissioner, the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), could also be incorporated, either in discussions with the Government or certainly after Second Reading.

[Christina Rees]

I agree totally. It can be discussed and agreed in due course, because there is widespread support in this debate for the measures. The sooner we get on with it, the better. The reason why we want to put the change into primary legislation is that, as a regulation—as it is in respect of civil partnerships—it could be changed at any time. We need to cement the regulation relating to civil partnerships as well.

As the right hon. Member for Meriden said, the Bill is the result of a long campaign. A petition in January 2014 on change.org in January 2014 collected more than 70,000 signatures. A campaign on Twitter followed with the hashtag #MothersOnMarriageCerts, which had heavy coverage from the BBC, the Telegraph’s Wonder Women journalists and the New Statesman, which is a varied segment of the press to be supporting such a change. In August 2014, campaigners pressed the Prime Minister on the issue, and he agreed that it was high time the system was updated.

[Dr Huq]

rose—

[Christina Rees]

He said that he would ask the Home Office how it could be addressed.

[Dr Huq]

I apologise for my keenness to intervene. My hon. Friend mentioned the Prime Minister. I think that he said at the time that marriage certificates do not reflect modern Britain. Given that he declared recently at Prime Minister’s questions that he is now a feminist, is that not an example of how he seems to say one thing and do another? There has been zero progress on this important subject since August 2014.

[Christina Rees]

I could not possibly comment on that.

[Tulip Siddiq]

Go on.

[Christina Rees]

I agree with everything that my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) says. In January this year, the Minister for Immigration, the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), said in response to press inquiries that he was

“continuing to develop the options that will allow mothers’ names to be recorded on marriage certificates as soon as practicable.”

But still nothing has been done and this outdated practice continues.

In 2012 alone, 262,240 marriages took place in England and Wales, a 5.3% increase from the number of marriages in 2011. Unfortunately, we cannot calculate how many marriages have taken place since August 2014, because the Office for National Statistics stopped counting in 2012. However, it is safe to extrapolate that hundreds of thousands of marriages have taken place while the Government have failed to act. That is hundreds of thousands of instances in which women have been accorded second-class status. In a developed country in the 21st century, that beggars belief.

[Mrs Spelman]

Does the hon. Lady appreciate that the announcement of the private Member’s Bill prompted, among other things, the Church of England consultation of the clergy, which only concluded just before the 4 November deadline? The consultation was among some of the practitioners most directly involved, and it is relevant to the discussion of what form some of the changes should take. It probably feels as though it has taken a very long time, but it is not when compared with the two centuries that we have allowed to elapse without putting the mother on the certificate. Getting it right is important. Often, when private legislation is introduced, it prompts action, which is what has happened here.

[Christina Rees]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for acknowledging that the Bill prompted action and a consultation. Her offer to work together is encouraging. She mentioned that the practice has been changed in Scotland and Northern Ireland and for civil partnerships, so I cannot see why it cannot be done in England and Wales. Why delay further?

My daughter Angharad may one day get married—who knows? I had better wave to her—and if she does, I sincerely hope that my name will feature on her marriage certificate. My hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), we are delighted to hear, will soon give birth to a daughter. She has raised this important issue during Prime Minister’s questions and has rightly called for women not to be written out of history.

My final appeal is for support for the Bill that I have presented, which will have Second Reading on 22 January. Its beauty is in its simplicity. We can make any changes that might need to be made to embrace further family set-ups. We might not know how families will be composed in future, but I am sure that that can be taken care of in Committee. We need to move forward without delay.

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[Victoria Prentis]

The hon. Lady makes a point that I will come on to shortly.

First, however, I will again quote the Prime Minister, from his speech to the Relationships Alliance summit, which I referred to earlier. He said:

“We all know that a strong family begins with a strong relationship between two loving people who make a deep and lasting commitment to each other…in Britain we recognise and value the commitment that people make to each other. And that’s just as vital whether the commitment is between a man and a woman, a man and a man or a woman and another woman.”

As we have heard from other Members this afternoon, it was in that same speech that the Prime Minister announced plans to address the “inequality in marriage”, to enable mothers’ names to be included on marriage certificates as well as fathers’ names.

I have discussed this issue at length with one of my constituents, who has been in a relationship for a considerable time; in fact, we are all eagerly awaiting her engagement as well. She pointed out that she is estranged from her father, who subjected her and her siblings to sexual abuse over a number of years, and has not seen him since she was 10. As a result, she would not want his name to be included on her own marriage certificate.

I looked into this matter and I understand from guidance from the General Register Office and from my own diocese in Oxford that

“If either party does not wish to put their father’s details in the Register or they do not know who their father is, you should not put ‘unknown’ or leave the column blank. You should put a horizontal line through both columns to show that no information was given.”

Although that would reflect in some ways my constituent’s wishes, it would also mean that there would be no mention of her mother, who understandably had to act as both mother and father to her during the very difficult circumstances of her upbringing. I feel strongly that a marriage certificate should recognise such a scenario.

[Christina Rees]

There is a rare exception by which a mother’s details can be included; it is if she has been authorised by a court as the sole adopter. Then a couple can make a special request to have her details put on the register and in the certificate. The other way that it can be done is via a loophole, whereby the mothers’ names can be included if the mothers are witnesses, but that is the only other way I can see round this problem.

[Victoria Prentis]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. Sadly, this matter involving my constituent never came before a court, so it is not possible to resolve it in that way. It is now important that we move forward to reflect the fact that families do not look how we once thought they always would.

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[Tulip Siddiq]

I will not speak about the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Christina Rees), but I am happy to let her intervene if she wants to.

[Christina Rees]

The point is that regulation can be changed at any time; if these things are put in primary legislation, they cannot be. As I said, I welcome discussion, and we can change my Bill in Committee. The Bill will have its Second Reading on 22 January, and it addresses the main points. I think we should move forward with that.

[Tulip Siddiq]

I thank my hon. Friend.

I will just make a few final points. It is worth noting that countries such as Thailand, Bangladesh, Spain and France have already changed their laws so that mothers can be included on marriage certificates. Mothers’ names are already included on certificates in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which brings home the injustice for all of us. I want to make sure that changing the policy on this issue forms part of the patchwork of equality I hope all of us will champion in Parliament.

If my daughter gets married—she has the choice of whether to get married—she can have just her father on her marriage certificate if she wants, or she can have her mother on it if she wants. However, I want the option to be there, because if she cannot have her mother on her marriage certificate, she will have to write to her MP—which is me.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. Let me congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) again on bringing forward this subject for debate and on the expertise she has shown as the Second Church Estates Commissioner.

My right hon. Friend is my neighbour, but there is another lady in my life I would like to pay tribute to: my mother. My mother brought me up as a lone parent—my father left when I was very young. She often worked two or three jobs to keep a roof over our heads and to ensure that I was clean and ready for school. Despite all the hours she worked, she always made sacrifices in that regard. My politics were formed very much by my mother’s hard work and self-reliance. She is a great example in my life.

When I was married last year—rather late in the day—I had the great pleasure of my mother being there as a witness. She had a fantastic hat, whose dimensions were such that I imagine it could be seen from space. It was a great sadness to me that her name could not appear on the marriage certificate. I was completely unaware of that. I was involved in politics, but in local campaigning and not in the minutiae of legalistic matters that I am involved in today. Until I arrived at the wedding I was completely unaware of the situation, and although obviously I did not make a fuss or a big deal out of it, I just thought it was a ridiculous anomaly that the person who had played the greatest role in my life should not, on my special day, have her name appended to the record of the event.

[Christina Rees]

I had a similar experience when I got married many years ago. My father died when I was a young teenager and my mother brought me up. The father of my husband-to-be had also died many years before. The two mothers came to the ceremony but their names could not be on the certificate. That was when I realised it was a great injustice. I agree with what the hon. Gentleman says about someone being confronted with that on the happiest day of their life.

[Julian Knight]

That shows the importance of the Bill that the hon. Lady has introduced. We bring a lot of our own experiences to this place, and from that negative thing she has made something very positive. I welcome the private Member’s Bill, and perhaps the hon. Lady and my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden, in her capacity as Second Church Estates Commissioner and with her tremendous expertise, can come together to discuss and make progress with the matter. My right hon. Friend, with the Church, speaks with compassion about this matter.

We have been here before, with the 2002 White Paper. I believe that the idea was to make the change without primary legislation, and that it was decided that it could not happen by what I believe would have been a statutory instrument—I am still getting used to the terms. It was very unfortunate that that never came about. It would have been good to pass legislation then, although it would still have been happening many years later than it should have. Regardless of who is in power and of whether there is any party political aspect to the matter, I ask hon. Members to put those things behind us and focus on the issue now.

I welcome the review. My hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration has been discussing the matter and I look forward to hearing the response to the debate from the Minister who is present today. My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) made a significant point about survivors of abuse, and I have a constituent who is in a similar position. She is in a serious relationship and looking towards marriage, but in her background is an abusive father and there are issues about what that person’s place is in her life. We need to be sensible of that issue—and the idea that we can get rid of it with two broad strokes of the pen across the paper is ridiculous.

We must work together across the parties, with expertise. Let us have the change that would, frankly, get us into the 20th century and, with civil partnerships and the recognition of same-sex relationships and marriage, move things forward into the 21st century.

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[Richard Harrington]

As the hon. Lady will know, I cannot speak for every private Member’s Bill. The 1994 Act was brought forward by Gyles Brandreth, then a very well known MP. I had better make progress.

There is no question but that the Government want to see the issue remedied. The question is whether the private Member’s Bill of the hon. Member for Neath (Christina Rees) can be, as many have suggested in this Chamber and elsewhere, the piece of legislation that is needed. I point out that many Members here seem to have children of marriageable age who are currently unmarried: I have two boys aged 24 and 21. I am pleased to say that the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) is a good personal friend of mine, and I think we should discuss the matter outwith the Chamber.

Getting back to the important point, can the private Member’s Bill be adapted? I would very much like to say yes. The Bill requires the Secretary of State to consult and then to make regulations setting out the marriage register entry, including the mother’s and father’s name, but it does not reform the whole registration process. It would simply require the replacement of tens of thousands of books at a cost of £3 million. The Bill does not take account of different family circumstances, where there may not be a mother and father. Members have mentioned many particular cases relating to that. It also does not give flexibility for the future. After we have amended the law, the matter may not be again for another 100 or 200 years, so we have to get things right.

[Christina Rees]

Will the Minister work with me to make the private Member’s Bill cover the things he mentions better? Can we work together to move it forward on 22 January?

[Richard Harrington]

I cannot pledge to work with the hon. Lady on the Bill, because I am not convinced that it is the right way to deal with the matter, although many of the points and sentiments in it are right. What we need—I assure her that this will be progressed quickly—is a vehicle that will transform the whole system of marriage registration for the digital age, so that all the points and everything that is changing in society can be taken into consideration. I assure her that that is not in any way meant to be disrespectful to what she is trying to do. I am not against any of the sentiments or saying that anything within the Bill is wrong, but we need a comprehensive solution. I assure her that this is not Government waffle. We have to deal with the matter once and for all, quickly and properly. I would like to be able to say that her Bill is the vehicle for that, but I do not believe that it could be. A combination of the hon. Lady, my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden and some of our discussions could get to a vehicle that could deal with things quickly—I have every reason to believe that.

I would like to say that it makes sense to have a simple amendment of the current marriage register. Like so many of the things that we get involved in—I find this when speaking to constituents—we think that the matter is simple and that we know the solution, but this matter is much more complex than that. We do not want to have to change the system again and again. We want a comprehensive solution with a framework for the modern digital economy, where—we hope everything will be transformed in this way—people will get a certificate quickly with all the relevant details and where there will be no need for replacement certificate stock to be sent to thousands of different churches and other institutions.

Also, the solution should minimise the public protection risk of marriage registers being held in some 30,000 different religious buildings. Every year criminal gangs steal registers and certificate stock for all sorts of different purposes, and it is time that the system was modernised once and for all. It would cost up to £3 million simply to replace the materials. A simple solution of just filling in the empty box was suggested, but that would lead to all sorts of mistakes and inaccuracies. While the suggestion is perfectly well-intentioned, I do not think it is very practical.

As the shadow Minister mentioned, we have to make the necessary IT changes with the correct resources. It is not a question of trying to save money with the new system, although once it was set up, it would probably save a lot of money and be much more efficient over the decades. Costs would be incurred. It is not just about making the system more cost-effective, although it will be over the longer term.

I want to mention some of the contributions made by various Members. The hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) made a point that, although not specific to the debate, surprised me. She asked me to look into the subject of illegitimacy on the Passport Office website. I will do that and I will respond as quickly as I can. I was astounded to hear what she said.

There have been so many good contributions, although I disagree with what the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) said about the Prime Minister’s feminism, because he is very much a feminist. However, the point that she made about the deceased father on the birth certificate is valid and I will write to her on that subject when I have had a chance to look into it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) talked about a constituent and what form the marriage certificate should take, but it is not a simple matter. At the moment, our officials at the Home Office are working with key stakeholders to ensure that the needs of all different types of families are met. It is not simply a case of making a one-off change to include the mother. The matter affects different types of families, and the change needs to be done properly.

I smiled when the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) mentioned Seacole, the Scottish lady, and explained her background. A big chunk of the Home Office is named after Mary Seacole. I do not know whether the hon. Lady has visited, but she is welcome to come and look at the plaque. Of course, she is right. We are not talking about the contributions of women to society, because that is taken as read and is obvious. The concept of property in Victorian times would be laughable if it were not so serious, because it blighted women’s development for centuries. If we explain that to our kids, they simply cannot understand such concepts. I have shown children and visitors from my constituency the pictures in the Committee rooms of men—all men—in Parliament, but they cannot imagine such a situation. I can only say that what the hon. Lady said is absolutely right.

The serious point to make is that the Government are not simply playing with the issue in order to kick it into the long grass and say, “Well, it is one of those things.” It is very serious. It is absolutely absurd that the law has not been changed before. It is absurd, whether under a Conservative, coalition or Labour Government, that it has taken from the 1830s to today to even look at the matter. I know that people like the tradition of the marriage certificate. I have one, as have many people in this room, but we should keep the best bits of tradition and amend accordingly.

I ask for the brief patience of hon. Members. The issues are sometimes personal to us and our constituents, as highlighted in the debate, but I ask for brief patience because the Government are determined to get this right.