My Lords, the co-signatory to this amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, has asked me to give her apologies. She is chairing the House’s EU Sub-Committee B at this moment. However, she asked me to make clear her total support for this amendment. It is nine years to the very day since the House agreed to her amendment extending civil partnerships to family members, especially in view of the financial disadvantage they suffer under, for example, inheritance tax. At that time, the Government acknowledged the importance of this issue, yet the amendment was overturned in the other place and still nothing has been done. Because there is to be an urgent and wholesale review of civil partnerships, we firmly believe that family members and carers should be first in the queue to benefit.
I have tried to persuade the House more than once to take heed of the unfair way in which carers and siblings are treated in our law, compared with those in a sexual relationship. Clause 14 provides for a review of civil partnerships and a chance at last for fairness. When the Civil Partnership Bill was passing through Parliament, an amendment to it was adopted in this House by 148 votes to 130, which would have had the effect of extending the availability of civil partnership and the associated inheritance tax concession to family members within the so-called “prohibited degrees of relationship”. The amendment was reversed when the Bill returned to the other place.
During the course of the debate in this House, the noble Lord, Lord Alli, said:
“I have great sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady O'Cathain, when she talks about siblings who share a home or a carer who looks after a disabled relative. Indeed, she will readily acknowledge that I have put the case several times—at Second Reading and in Grand Committee—and I have pushed the Government very hard to look at this issue. There is an injustice here and it needs to be dealt with, but this is not the Bill in which to do it. This Bill is about same-sex couples whose relationships are completely different from those of siblings”.—[Official Report, 24/6/04; col. 1369.]
In the same debate, the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said:
“There is a strongly arguable case for some kind of relief from inheritance tax for family members who have been carers to enable them to continue living in the house where they have carried out their caring duties. But that is a different argument and this is not the place or the time for that argument. This Bill is inappropriate for dealing with that issue”.—[Official Report, 24/6/04; col. 1374.]
During the course of the debate in the Standing Committee of the House of Commons, Jacqui Smith, the then Deputy Minister for Women and Equality, said:
“We heard a widespread agreement from Members across almost all parties that the Civil Partnership Bill is not the place to deal with the concerns of relatives”—
although she agreed with them—
“not because those concerns are not important, but because the Bill is not the appropriate legislative base on which to deal with them”.—[Official Report, Commons, Standing Committee D, 19/10/04; col. 8.]
There is no dissent from the desirability of extending a legally recognised partnership of some sort to related and carer couples. However, we are repeatedly told—whatever Bill is before Parliament—that it is not the right one in which to address the issue. That is not a
good argument when their human rights are concerned. The situation is now even more pertinent and pressing, because the unfairness has increased. Civil partners and married couples, gay or straight, will be treated in law far better than, for example, two elderly sisters who share a house or an elderly father and the daughter who cares for him.
I first became interested in this topic because two of my most brilliant former students at Oxford were counsel for two sisters in a case that I am about to describe. One of those students now sits on the Cross-Benches, my noble friend Lord Pannick. The case to which I refer and which is the best known in this field, is that of Miss Joyce and Miss Sybil Burden, sisters, one of whom is now well over 90 and the other approaching 90. They are still alive, to the best of my knowledge, and have lived together for about 85 years. They remain single. They cared for their parents and two aunts to the end and did not allow them to go into a home.
On the death of the first sister, inheritance tax was estimated in 2008 to be about £120,000 and may be more now if the value of their house has risen. The sisters lost their case of discrimination before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights. The court held that marriage was different. With respect, the judgment was unsatisfactory not only because of the narrow defeat in court but for the lack of logic. The Government took down the barriers between marriage and other forms of association by enacting advantages for same-sex couples entering a civil partnership and now, shortly, gay marriage.
The European Court of Human Rights held that there was discriminatory treatment of the sisters, but that the UK had a wide margin of appreciation afforded to it and could treat benefits differently according to status in pursuit of the aim of promoting stable relationships by providing the survivor with, inter alia, financial security on the death of a spouse or partner. The lines drawn by the court in that case will no longer exist. All will be redrawn by the passage of the Bill. The unions or marriages that the Government seek to bolster will no longer have to be heterosexual, will not have to involve sex or procreation, but need only to be stable, loving and committed. Those are to be the only criteria in future.
Many siblings are connected perhaps coolly and only by common parentage, but where there are two, such as the Burden sisters, who have lived together for decades in a loving, committed and stable relationship and sharing a home to the exclusion of all other partners, they are indistinguishable in terms of deserving recognition and support from gay marriages or civil partnerships. Any two family members or carers who stay together for decades as an act of self-determination and personal development are a recognisable and welcome unit. Treating them like married people will in fact save the state costs that might otherwise be involved in taking care of them and giving them benefits because, on the death of one of the two elderly sisters whom I mentioned, the survivor will end up paying a large amount of inheritance tax which will mean selling the home, possibly pushing the survivor into state care.
Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights forbids discrimination in rights that are granted on the grounds, inter alia, of birth or other status. There is a clear case here which must urgently be addressed in the review of civil partnerships, ideally by an amendment to the Bill. Why should consanguinity be any less important than the relationship between married and civil partners? The state should not prefer sexual relationships, which may be short-lived and serial, over blood relationships that have proved to have endured decades. The Government should show—they cannot logically—that it is reasonable or necessary to exclude carers and related couples from the new marriage. I cannot resist quoting from Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”—some of your Lordships may remember it:
“Sisters, sisters. There were never such devoted sisters”.
How true in many cases.
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Marriage has lost its special status and equality has been established by this Bill. If it is right to promote stable, long-term family partnerships, one cannot object to the proposal that I am putting forward—that is, to investigate giving formality to a bond which might in some respects be deeper and longer lasting than a marriage and which has co-dependence and supportiveness. The Government should right a wrong for a small number of people and give them the joy and benefits of a union as described by the supporters of this Bill. Perhaps I may quote the Burden sisters, who write to me quite a lot. They say:
“We have spent our lives looking after people and never once done anything wrong. And now we are punished for doing the right thing. This government is always going out of its way to give rights to people who have done nothing to deserve them. If we were lesbians we would have all the rights in the world. But we are sisters and it seems we have no rights at all”.
Once marital rights, such as pension rights and rights to take key medical decisions and so on, are extended beyond marriage, there is no good reason not to extend them still further to others in long-term caring and stable relationships who happen to be related by blood. If my suggestion is not adopted, I and possibly many noble Lords will be very puzzled. We will wonder if it is necessary to have a royal commission on the financial recognition that should be given to a whole variety of relationships that exist today and will exist in the future. To quote again from Irving Berlin: “Lord help the” Minister,
“who comes between me and my sister”.
I can see no case for giving generous treatment to civil partners and married people when it is not available to those who have not the choice or the freedom to enter a formal relationship, whose contracts may not be recognised by the courts and who, as the sisters say, have tried every way to avoid the burden of the inheritance tax that is likely to fall on one of them with such devastating consequences. That inheritance tax is a small matter. It is paid by fewer than 3% of the population and raises less than £3 billion per annum for the Government.
The genie is out of the bottle. Currently, all the varieties of unions that support us in life are inconsistently treated. There are those who would force marriage law
onto cohabitants who would like to avoid it. I am not talking about that. However, we must give succour and benefits to those who want a legally recognised status but are denied it. I beg to move.