Urgent: Three days to protect the bright line of marriage

In June, when the Government’s cohabitation consultation opened, I showed you the crack in its foundations. In the consultation’s final week, that warning has been proved right.

Finland introduced similar measures in 2011. The Centre for Social Justice has just published the first proper analysis of what happened next, and it found that Finnish women’s first marriage rate ended up 23 per cent lower within seven years than it would likely have been otherwise. Yes, you read that correctly. A scheme narrower than the one proposed for us was followed by marriage falling by nearly a quarter against where it was heading.

The reform also did not make cohabiting households more stable. Stability among cohabiting couples fell too. Finland traded away marriage and got nothing for it – and Finnish fertility fell by over a fifth in the years that followed.

Coalition for Marriage has now submitted its formal response, all eleven thousand words of it, comprehensively dismantling their unfounded assertions with irrefutable evidence. You can view our response in full. I read every page of what the Government published, and what I found in those pages did not survive contact even with its own footnotes.

Their impact assessment never once assesses what the scheme would do to marriage – and its front page answers the question of whether anyone will check afterwards. “Will the policy be reviewed? It will not be reviewed.”

Their exclusion for married couples only covers couples married to each other. Their own words – the exclusion “would not prevent a person from bringing a claim against someone who is married, where the applicant is in a cohabiting relationship with that person”. A man still married to his wife could face a marriage-style claim from another woman he lives with, paid from the same assets!

And their own equalities assessment shows previously married lone mothers are markedly less likely to be in poverty than previously cohabiting ones – then concludes the answer is to give cohabitation more of marriage’s legal furniture. As though the legal rights themselves were what produced the stability.

Underneath every one of these findings sits the same simple thing, and it is worth stating loudly. Marriage is a bright line, everyone knows who crossed it and when, including the couple themselves – one public day, chosen, witnessed and dated. This scheme would replace the line with a fog. ‘Rights’ that arrive unseen at three years, or sooner where a child is in the household. ‘Rights’ you can escape only by deed, with two solicitors. ‘Rights’ narrower than marriage while you live together, yet identical to it when you die. The bright line is what protects; the fog is what this consultation proposes.

However, there is real hope here, and not only because the evidence has turned. This consultation was launched under one Prime Minister and closes under another. The new Government owes this scheme nothing, and the public is not asking for it – fewer than a quarter think changing cohabitation law should be a priority at all. A government that paused this now would be siding with the public and with the evidence at the same time.

This is where you come in. The consultation closes at 11.59pm this Friday, 14 August. Our response is one submission. Thousands of yours, in your own words, are what a department cannot ignore. You do not need to be a lawyer and you do not need to answer every question. If you answer only one, make it Question 43, on inheritance, and say in its box why the bright line of marriage should stay. Respond online or simply email your thoughts to frcohabconsultation@justice.gov.uk – there is no required format. Please do it today rather than Friday evening.