My Lords, the lateness of the hour and my fatigue make it certain that I shall not take as much of your Lordships’ time as I should like to because I regard this as an important amendment. My intention is simply to strengthen the Bill, which may come as a surprise to noble Lords opposite who have the feeling that anything that comes from people like me is bound to be in some way sinister. How exaggerated are the head shakes that I see, but they are welcome none the less.
The Bill addresses an acknowledged evil. It is a rift in our society that needs to be mended. The tragedy is that the way in which it has been introduced has made it much harder to implement. However, that makes me keener for the Bill to do the job effectively. When the civil partnership legislation was introduced, it was generally understood that civil partnerships were to be taken as the equivalent of marriage and conferred equal status. However, that did not happen. The Bill needs to produce a status that is the equivalent of marriage. Given that it can be done no other way, some of us have reluctantly come to the view that the status must also be marriage.
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We have mostly been considering same-sex people who are at present single but who wish to become united. However, the biggest and most obvious injustice has been done to those who have been in civil partnerships for the past 10 years and have not gained thereby what was sold to them—that is, equal status. There is a difference between the two that is clear in the statute. In Clause 9, we therefore have the arrangements by which a civil partnership can be converted into a marriage. One would think that would be a momentous occasion and should be attended with some ceremony. I am well aware, from the volume of letters I have received, of the need for a measure of this kind and I am particularly taken by letters that have said, “We want to be united in exactly the same way as people who are married”.
The defining element of a marriage in the 1949 Act is the vows that are exchanged. All we have in Clause 9 is a regulating power. I looked at the arrangements for civil partnerships and the vows that are exchanged. I found that registrars would offer forms of vows which people could choose between and, if they did not like them, they could have their own words but they would have to be cleared by the registrar. I rang up the local registrar’s services association to find out what guidance was given to registrars on what would be suitable. The only advice registrars receive, I understand, is that there must be no religious words in the vows; otherwise they can be as people wish.
If the Bill is genuinely to become an Act that elevates same-sex couples who are in a partnership into what is seen as the higher status of marriage, and if many of those couples want it to be exactly the same, the amendment would do it for them. All I have done is to take the wording from subsections (2), (3) and (3A) of Section 44 of the Marriage Act 1949 and import it into the Bill. All I am trying to do is to strengthen civil partnership on its importation into marriage so that the two are the same. Not only would the same-sex couple be able to look at the opposite-sex couple and say, “We have got something as good as you have got”, but the opposite-sex couple could look at them and say, “You have got what we have got and each is as good as the other”.
That is the object of the Bill. If the Government reject the amendment on grounds of drafting, I ask them to put the drafting right. If they reject it on the grounds that it is unnecessary, I honestly think that I have demonstrated that it is not. If there is no difference between a civil partnership and a marriage, what on earth is the Bill for? I wait with bated breath. I trust that your Lordships will be friendly to this because it is a friendly offer.