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

Debate between James Cartlidge and Victoria Prentis

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Friday 15th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

I am reading out her personal and passionately held views. I certainly would not make any judgment on them. The interesting thing is that when my researcher passed me this note, she said that she was discussing the Bill last night with friends. She is in her mid-20s. They all said that they would prefer this route than marriage. I think that that is profoundly interesting.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I have heard equally powerful testimonies from those who are the product of broken marriages and who come to the idea of marriage with a lot of baggage. Is that something my hon. Friend recognises?

[James Cartlidge]

That is an excellent point. Frankly, whatever form the legal joining takes, we cannot legislate for humanity’s various ways of working positively and negatively and interacting with one another. There will be breakdowns in civil partnerships just as in traditional marriages. I hope that having this structure means that more people bring more stability for their children and to their lives in a way that they find amenable. I think that this is a historic moment and that this option will become very common. I do not know what assessment or predictions have been made of the likely take-up—who can possibly say?—but I think that this change will have a very significant impact.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent contribution and he is absolutely right. It is interesting that the Bill brings not only choice, but responsibility. We are not talking about some sort of libertarian agenda. The Bill provides a chance to have a choice and also to bring greater stability to people’s lives and for the children that they may have, so that is a very good point.

I want to make one more point about my researcher, Councillor Steer, whose testimony on this important matter I read out. It is fair to say that she is not a Brexiteer and that she sees certain advantages in marrying a Swede—although, of course, that is not the reason. I raised that point in intervening on my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, the promoter of this very good Bill, because it is important and will bring focus in future to what happens on someone’s nationality if they have a civil partnership as opposed to a marriage, and so on. However, there are finer legal minds in the Chamber today to comment on these matters, and I will leave that to them.

On timing, it is interesting that my researcher would have chosen the option under the Bill. The sooner that it can be available, the better, because there really are people on whose lives the Bill would impact and who would choose to go down this route. It is satisfying to know that the very latest that the provisions may be used is new year’s eve. I imagine that if that is when there is the first civil partnership under the Bill, there will be quite a party.

Finally, I note that amendment 1 refers to the “financial consequences” of civil partnership. In my experience, there is a lot of complexity around inheritance tax regulations, pensions and so on, and I hope that others may be able to clarify the implications of some of those points. I am very happy to support the Bill. Not only is it a very good Bill in the areas that it covers, such as marriage certificates and others, but I think it will be historic and in future standard practice by which people cement commitment and show their love for each other in a way that is no more or less worthy than any other.

[Victoria Prentis]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), who spoke very passionately. I echo what he said at the beginning of his speech: it is relevant, when, on Fridays, we consider important, life-changing events, that we think about people around the world recovering in the aftermath of a horrific attack in New Zealand. I think today about my constituents going to Friday prayers at our two mosques in Banbury. That will be a difficult and worrying experience for people all around the world and it is right that we should think of them.

This is the third time that I have risen to support the Bill. We could view it as hatched and matched, and now is the time to dispatch it to the wider world. I am very glad to see that the Lords considered it in such detail and to be here today for its return to the Commons. I appreciate the Bill’s far-reaching scope, but it has come a long way since it was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton)—my good friend. It is customary on Fridays for us all, at this point in the dispatching process, to praise to the skies the hon. Member who has brought the Bill to its dispatching moment, but as he did that so well himself, I do not know that I need to add much, apart from to congratulate him on ultimately getting dressed this morning and to thank him for the persistence and good humour with which he has involved very many people in both Houses in the production of the Bill.

Looking around the Chamber, I see my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight), who I remember had a very emotional debate in Westminster Hall when we first arrived in this place about mothers’ names on marriage certificates. I think that he, like me, would like to pay tribute to our other right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman), who has worked particularly hard on that issue, which really is irritatingly long overdue.

In all seriousness, I pay great tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, who has worked hard, even if he knows it himself. I wish all parts of the Bill well. It has had cross-party support and I hope that we can come to an agreement today so that it can get through its remaining stages and receive Royal Assent before the end of the parliamentary Session. I also hope that Members in the Chamber continue to push. We may have achieved consultations and we may have got the Government to agree to look at things, but we want to deliver on all the Bill’s promises, so that dispatching means fruition rather than the sadder meanings of the word.

The focus of amendments from the Lords centre around extending civil partnerships to other couples. We have moved from a position where the Government were going to undertake unspecified work on how that could be done to putting an obligation on the Minister for Women and Equalities to prepare a report on the subject. We find ourselves today with a real commitment to bring in the necessary regulations before the end of the year. This is a great example of how Back-Bench MPs can work with Government to bring about change, and it is possibly also an example of why we think that a deal is better than no deal.

I also welcome the reassurance in subsection 7 that the decision to host an opposite-sex civil partnership on religious premises will remain a decision for individual religious organisations. I know that the Bishop of Oxford made an extremely thoughtful contribution when the matter was discussed in the other place last week.

Value Added Tax Bill

Debate between James Cartlidge and Victoria Prentis

Friday 8th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge]

That is an excellent point. What worries me is that if we make unfunded commitments that do not result in the so-called dynamic behaviour that has been predicted and the Treasury loses revenue, the people who pay will not be us in this Chamber or anyone outside, but people who have not yet been born. We will stick the balance on the national credit card and, ultimately, the national debt. That is what happens if we do not take control of public finances.

I also want to talk about the transition period and leaving without a deal. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch seemed to suggest that we would benefit from not having a transition, because we would be able to vary VAT. He will remember that in his speech in the recent no-confidence debate—he spoke eloquently, although it took me some time to work out whether he had confidence in the Government or not—he advocated a WTO-terms exit. I intervened on him to ask what he would do about the 40% tariff on sheep meat, and he said to me that that was “Project Fear”.

In fact, if we leave without a deal, we will have to have the default WTO schedule, because there is nothing else. That schedule includes some very onerous tariffs indeed, not least for our farmers and exporters. In a debate about the cost to consumers of VAT, it is quite something to advocate allowing certain household items that we take for granted—such as dry pasta and tinned tomatoes—to be tariffed at 15% or 20% in a few weeks’ time. This is most significant for our exporters. In my constituency, I have household name companies—by that, I mean that they are very well known in the constituency—that have written to me about no deal. The matter is critical for them; in one case, the default tariff exceeds the margin that the company makes. That is serious stuff, which we need to be prepared for.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an important point about tariffs on agricultural products. Does he agree that it is very difficult for farmers, who are dealing with living animals, to plan their sales in the most helpful way? I meet a farmer regularly—indeed, whenever I drop my children off at the school bus—who tells me that he is selling sheep at the moment, much earlier than he would have liked, because he is worried about the effect of no deal.

[James Cartlidge]

That is a good point. I was simply trying to make the point that we are talking about the impact of VAT on the consumer, yet if the no-deal scenario that some Members wish for happens, consumers will face onerous costs. By the way, even if we decided that we wanted to cut tariffs unilaterally, we could not; we are not taking back control of France, Germany and the rest. We cannot cut tariffs on our exports, and we would have far less leverage in trade deals. That is an extremely serious prospect, and we need to think about it.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Debate between James Cartlidge and Victoria Prentis

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 1st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I sincerely hope we will not be having an election next year; I think we have had enough for now.

[James Cartlidge]

Surely the key point my hon. Friend is making is that, whereas the Labour party is seeking to defend the status quo, Conservative Members are the radicals and the reformers.

[Victoria Prentis]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and he makes the point I was going on to make: while we do not, of course, agree with everything in the people’s charter—for example, it provides only for votes for men, and Conservative Members are passionately in favour of votes for women—we do adopt the more far-reaching ideas in it, and we believe very firmly that votes must count equally.