There is a trade-off, because if the Bill goes through in its current form an inequality will be created and there will be a delay—we do not know for how long—for opposite-sex couples, who are unable to access civil partnerships, with no commitment that it will be addressed, while same-sex partners will be able to access marriages in fairly short order.
I have a few more remarks to make on how quickly I think that can happen. I think that the whole argument about delay is a complete red herring. The cost of £4 billion is completely and utterly spurious. I asked for a Library note on the cost impact assessments done at the time of the Civil Partnership Act 2004. Part of it says that the cost to the Government was divided between total one-off fixed costs of £19.8 million for changes in administration and rising annual costs each year in both low and high take-up scenarios. The annual cost to the Government in 2010 was estimated at £1.5 million for the low take-up scenario and £3 million for the high-take up scenario, and that that would rise to £11.6 million and £22.2 million a year in each scenario by 2050. The components of the annual costs were state pensions for spouses and bereavement benefits for surviving civil partners, and public funding for civil partnership dissolutions. The note refers throughout to tens of millions of pounds, but nowhere near the figure in the billions that has been plucked out of the air with absolutely no empirical evidence and which was never intended as an official impact assessment from the DWP when the Pensions Minister made his statement to the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week.