I have precisely the statistics that my hon. Friend is looking for. If she is patient for a few minutes longer, I will give her exactly that information.
Such people are mostly in committed loving relationships, but if they do not want to go for a traditional marriage, they have no way of having that recognised in the eyes of the state. That brings me on to the third main rationale for this reform—I promise that I will then come to my hon. Friend’s point. Particularly worrying is the common misconception that there is such a thing as a common-law wife or husband, as a woman typically finds out abruptly on the death of the partner when there is an inheritance tax bill on the estate and potentially on the family home. If a woman has a child with her partner and the relationship breaks down, she is not entitled to any form of financial support if they are not married. There is no automatic entitlement to property, even if she had been paying into the mortgage.
When one partner is much older than the other and there is a reasonable expectation that one will die some years before the other, the long-term survivor would not receive the same tax benefits as a married woman or those in a civil partnership. That would be discriminatory towards the couples’ children. The same vulnerabilities can apply if one partner does a runner. Even a couple engaged to be married have more rights than a cohabiting opposite-sex couple.