My Lords, it is an enormous pleasure to follow the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who knows far more about this subject than I could hope to learn and speaks with great authority as, among other things, a former senior family judge. Like her, I should say straightaway that I am married. I have been married for 42 years and my wife has put up with me throughout that time. I am a very strong supporter of marriage. If I thought that this Bill would deter people from marrying, I would oppose it, and if I thought that it would coerce people into cohabiting relationships, I would find that inappropriate for the state. It does no such thing.
I should begin by expressing my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames for introducing a Bill that is more modest than mine, except in relation to a two-year rather than a five-year period. As I say, in other respects it is more modest and probably more realistic and in accordance with what the Law Commission has recommended. We have to live a very long time and we have to be very patient to achieve social reform in this country. Governments lack the imagination and energy to do it themselves, so we have to stimulate them, unfortunately, with Private Members’ Bills—or perhaps fortunately, since otherwise nothing would happen.
My noble friend Lord Marks got history slightly wrong. The first time I engaged with this was in 2002 at Second Reading of my Civil Partnerships Bill. In that Bill, I provided for opposite-sex couples as well as same-sex couples to be able to enter into civil partnerships. I did that because I was advised to do so by Stonewall, which thought that it might make the Bill more acceptable. Curiously, there was complete agreement about the need for gay and lesbian couples to be civil partners, but some of the more conservative and orthodox Bishops opposed the stuff about opposite-sex couples because they thought that it would threaten marriage. It does not seem to worry people but there is no evidence from any country, including this country, that the existence of civil partnership schemes, as in Ireland or something more modest such as my noble friend’s Bill, in any way discourages marriage.
On the contrary, as Resolution has pointed out in its submissions and as the Royal Commission has observed, the evidence is that it does not in any way discourage marriage. It provides a safety net in order that, instead of the state having to bail out through public finance the consequences of irresponsible men abandoning the women and children they have been involved with and putting the women—the mother—on social security, it makes the bad men pay instead of us as taxpayers, which I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, understands. If one looks at this Bill through the eyes of an economist or someone concerned with money, the effect is to transfer some of the burden away from the state on to irresponsible common-law husbands and fathers.
The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is the most doughty, indefatigable campaigner against everything that I have just said. I hope she will not mind my saying that, if I put in the scales her views and the views of the Law
Commission, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and Resolution, they and their evidence seem to me to be more persuasive.