Civil partnerships should be for siblings

Brothers and sisters risk losing their homes because ministers have failed to fix a real injustice

For a while, it looked as though Penny Mordaunt, the equalities minister, was going to let logic prevail and consign civil partnerships – obsolete since the introduction of same-sex marriage – to the history books. But sustained pressure from the “Equal Civil Partnerships” lobby group, spearheaded by Charles Keidan and Rebecca Steinfeld, has proved too much. The Government has announced that civil partnerships will not be scrapped, but extended to all romantic, heterosexual couples.

With the formidable Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld on her tail, it’s hardly surprising that Ms Mordaunt caved. The couple has been making waves, arguing that the quirky law forbidding them to enter a civil partnership amounted to cruelty.

Their diagnosis – that civil partnerships are a mess – is correct. These were rushed through Parliament in 2004 by a centrist prime minister who wanted to help the LGBT community but didn’t have the guts to campaign for equal marriage. But Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld’s demand, that civil partnerships should be extended to heterosexual couples, was half-baked and misguided. It should have been ignored.

For a start, the appetite for heterosexual civil partnerships has been vastly overestimated, and the claim that they “will give greater financial security to 3.3 million unmarried cohabiting couples in England and Wales” is bogus. Yes, a few of the 3.3 million will be “woke” academics, who, like Mr Keidan and Ms Steinfeld, are deeply in love but are unable to abide the thought of marriage and the patriarchal baggage associated with it. But that’s not how ordinary people think.

Most of those 3.3 million couples are either “trying before buying” or long-term partners with no interest in state-endorsed commitment. Neither group will be chomping at the bit to get a civil partnership.

But the new legislation is worse than a waste of parliamentary resources. In bending over backwards to accommodate everyone, the Government has set itself on a course of action which will result in gross discrimination against one minority group: cohabiting blood relatives.

As the law stands, loving, committed, cohabiting blood relatives are the only cohabitees legally unable to access the fiscal safeguards awarded to married couples and civil partners; most importantly, the right to inherit a joint tenancy, and the right to pass on a jointly owned home to each other free of inheritance tax.

In the case of my mother and aunt – who have lived together all their lives and brought me up as co-parents – this means that, if one of them died, the bereaved sister would be forced to sell our family home immediately to pay the inheritance tax on the deceased sister’s share. According to our calculations, the sum the Government would extract from her would be roughly equal to the original joint mortgage they took out in 1995.

Hundreds of other siblings are in the same situation, and many have already had to hand over homes to HMRC.

The Siblings Couple Bill, passing through the Lords at the moment, seeks to rectify the problem by “amend[ing] the Civil Partnership Act 2004 to include sibling couples”. Lord Lexden, the Conservative who introduced the Bill, has argued that now same-sex couples are able to marry, civil partnership legislation should be repurposed and used as the vehicle to address the injustice faced by cohabiting platonic partners, who, because they are closely related by blood, are barred from marriage.

When the Government opened the “review of civil partnerships”, my family was hopeful that the essence of the Bill would be incorporated into any new legislation. Instead, the Government has chosen to corner off civil partnerships for romantic couples, and in so doing has singled out cohabiting blood relatives as unworthy of “state-sponsored relationships”.

In 2018, equal marriage is not only legally recognised, but celebrated. And romantically involved couples of all sexual orientations have the option of bringing up their children in a stable marital home. For them, civil partnerships are obsolete. In opening up civil partnerships to heterosexual romantic couples, the Government has fixed a fabricated injustice – and passed over the perfect opportunity to fix a real one.