Modern family types outside marriage for heterosexuals to be recognised
Civil partnerships will be opened up to heterosexual couples, Prime Minister Theresa May has announced.
Speaking to The Evening Standard this week while attending the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, May said samesex and opposite-sex couples would for the first time have ‘the same choices in life’.
More than three million couples in the UK live together but are not married, and about half of these have children.
Graham Coy, senior partner at Stowe Family Law’s London office, said: ‘This is a very welcome development and will provide protection to those who live together but do not want to marry.
‘What it will not do is give any protection to the increasing number of couples who do live together but do not want to marry nor enter in to a civil partnership. That anomaly still needs to be dealt with.’
Earlier this year, Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan (pictured), who wanted to have a civil partnership rather than a marriage but could not because they are a man and a woman, won a legal challenge at the Supreme Court, R (Steinfeld and Keidan) v Secretary of State for International Development [2018] UKSC 32. May’s announcement shows the government now intends to change the law in response.
Civil partnerships were introduced for same-sex couples through the Civil Partnership Act 2004 by Tony Blair’s government, giving them the opportunity to obtain the same rights and advantages as married couples. David Cameron, when in office, passed legislation that allowed same-sex couples to marry from March 2014. Civil partners can convert their relationship to marriage or retain their existing status. However, same-sex couples still can’t marry in Northern Ireland, and same-sex couples who are already married are recognised only as being in a civil partnership within its borders.
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