Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

James Duddridge Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Dr Huppert]

It is a great pleasure to follow the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley). I also want to pay huge tribute to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green). It has been a great pleasure to work with her during the passage of the Bill, and her speech today set the scene extremely well. I pay tribute to her, although I am not sure whether that will help or hinder her future plans. I thought that she did extremely well.

There are two issues that we need to debate today. One is the principle of whether we should allow humanists to conduct weddings; the other relates to the process of how we might get there. This is all made much more complicated because our marriage laws are incredibly complicated. They have exceptions and exemptions all over the place. The Second Church Estates Commissioner, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry), who speaks for the Church of England, and who I imagine knows the Marriage Act 1949 quite well, has spoken of how the rules are all tied to places. Section 26 of the Act states that marriages may be solemnised in

“a registered building…in the office of a superintendent registrar”,

and

“on approved premises”.

It also permits

“a marriage according to the usages of the Society of Friends (commonly called Quakers)”

and

“a marriage between two persons professing the Jewish religion according to the usages of the Jews”.

So we already have an exception and, as far as I can tell, the world has not fallen apart since those provisions were passed in 1949. They have worked without any problems. There are other areas of marriage law that are just complicated. We do not have a simple, clear system, and we are not going to get one as a result of any legislation that we pass today. That will involve further work.

Let me turn first to the question of principle. Is there a desire to allow humanists to conduct weddings? This was mentioned by the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt). If any Member here in the Chamber disagrees with the principle of humanists being allowed to conduct weddings, I would be grateful if they intervened on me to say so. If no one expresses such a view, we will take it that there is no dissent on that principle.

[James Duddridge (Rochford and Southend East) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is presuming; the fact those people who are currently in the Chamber do not express disagreement with him does not mean that he is right or that they all agree. That is blatantly obvious.

[Mike Weatherley]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comment. He is absolutely right to suggest that we cannot speculate accurately about the views of the people who are not in the Chamber. It is clear, however, that no strong views have been expressed that challenge the principle of holding humanist weddings, and I hope that that will be useful if this is discussed further in another place. There has not been a strong chorus of speeches here expressing disagreement with the principle. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the views of all 650 Members have not been taken into account, however. It would be helpful to know whether the Secretary of State supports humanist weddings in principle. She is welcome to intervene on me to give me her view on that. There is a desire for this change among the general public. Indeed, most people I have spoken to have been surprised to learn that humanist weddings are not allowed.

There are problems with how the process would work. People who had a humanist wedding would have to have a register office wedding first. Some registrars are very helpful, and make it easy for that to happen. They make it a seamless experience. Others, however, are difficult. They ensure, for example, that the events take place in different locations, thus breaking up the ceremony, to the detriment of people who should be having one of the happiest moments of their life. Some people who have a humanist wedding celebration do not have a legal wedding. I presume they know that they are not legally married, but that can cause problems for them. So there are concerns about the way in which the process works at the moment.

We know that this is a pro-marriage step. We have heard a lot from the Government and the Minister to say that the aim of the whole Bill is to support marriage. We know that that is what it does. We know that in Scotland between 2005 and 2011 there was a very large increase in the number of humanist weddings—the figure I have for the increase is 2,404—and there was a small decrease of 418 in civil weddings. Overall, that is a very large number of extra weddings. That is surely something that a pro-marriage Government would thoroughly want to support.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Freer]

May I return to the topic of amendment 49, which I was very pleased to co-sign with the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas)?

Let me start by reassuring my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) that building a stable and cohesive society is one of the most fundamental roles of Government, so to be doing that today through debating this Bill is a highly appropriate use of parliamentary time. To those who ask whether we should be doing something else, I say that I can, perhaps unusually for a man, multi-task, so I think I can manage both to speak in this debate and to deal with other pressing issues.

Turning specifically to the amendment, it is important to distinguish between contracted-in and contracted-out pensions. This is quite a technical change and it does not apply to contracted-out pensions; it applies only to contracted-in pensions. As the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion said, two-thirds of pension schemes already allow spousal survivors in civil partnerships equivalent widow or widower benefits without having to be forced to do so by the law, but one-third of them are discriminating. What is worse, that is an optional discrimination; they are choosing to discriminate against surviving civil partners in contracted-in pension schemes.

Let me try to explain why that is so fundamentally wrong. The hon. Lady gave the example of John Walker. Had he married a woman, she would have got a pension on his death of £41,000, but his civil partner got a pension of just £500 per annum. That diversity is the wrong kind of diversity; that is pure discrimination. Let us assume two men or two women join a pension scheme on the same day, and they both have the same level of service, and they both enter into some form of partnership, but one gets married and the other goes into a civil partnership, and let us also assume that the day after they get married or enter their civil partnership, they are both, by some quirk of fate, killed in a car accident. The pension of the widow in marriage will be go back to the date her former husband joined the pension scheme, let us say some 20 years previously, but the civil partner only gets to go as far back as when civil partnerships came into law. That cannot be right by any stretch of the imagination.

When researching why the Government were resisting this amendment, I was told that one of the issues is the cost factor. Everything we as a Government do has a cost, so I thought there must be some huge cost—perhaps £4 billion, which was a ready price-tag yesterday. In fact, the cost of giving equal pension rights on contracted-in pensions to civil partners is £18 million—not £80 million or £80 billion, but £18 million. It is true that that is a lot of money, and I certainly would not mind having £18 million in my bank account, but let me put that into perspective. The assets under management of the pension industry amount to £360 billion, so the cost of removing this anomaly is 0.006% of assets under management. I do not think that is a price we cannot afford.

I was also told that it is wrong to force pension providers to make retrospective calculations on which they did not base their pension actuarial decisions. That, too, is a flawed argument. As the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion said, the actuaries behind a pension scheme make a whole variety of assumptions about longevity, how many of their pensioners will die in service and how many of them will die as a pensioner, and how long they will stay in the pension, and the accrual rate will be based on an assumption that most of their members will get married. It is complete nonsense to suggest that pension providers cannot allow civil partners who survive to get the same benefit as a widow or widower because it has not been accrued, as there is absolutely no evidence that the actuaries have not been able to make that calculation. If they made the calculation that X% of their pensioners would get married, they could simply make assumptions about a man in a civil partnership. They will have had no knowledge of whether that man or woman would have decided to get married or to enter a civil partnership and there is no logical or financial reason why the anomaly cannot be removed.

I hope that the Minister will give some commitment from the Government that the anomaly will be reconsidered. I know it was mentioned in Committee and that the Government are resisting the amendments, but I urge my ministerial colleagues to address the issue.

[James Duddridge]

I totally support the comments my hon. Friend is making about removing the anomaly. Is there a list of companies that are already doing the right thing and, crucially, those that are doing the wrong thing? Are those companies named and shamed? Often, when we flick through the glossy corporate reports they say lots of glowing things and that the company is doing the right thing, but are they putting their money where their mouth is and supporting equal rights?

[Mike Freer]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I have tried to dig around to find out the size of liabilities and which companies are doing this, but unfortunately I cannot find that information. It is fair to say that many corporates take great pleasure in trumpeting in their annual reports what they would regard as their social responsibility, but I think that they should be saying loud and proud—to coin a phrase—that they are treating civil partners in the same way as heterosexual widows and widowers.

I hope that my ministerial colleagues can give some ground and say that the Government are willing to reconsider the matter. The cost is not even a rounding error in the Government accounts or for the pension industry, but the benefit to the recipients is beyond value.