News:

The Light Has Been Extinguished

The “light at the end of the tunnel” which was referred to in Newsletter 18 (April 2009) has been extinguished.

Readers will recall that a Private Members’ Bill had been introduced in the House of Lords to try to tackle the ever-increasing problems caused by the very unsatisfactory lack of any sort of legislative framework to resolve the issues (particularly financial) arising upon the breakdown of a cohabitation relationship.

The Bill achieved its Second Reading on Friday 13th March (an omen?).

It then moved to Committee stage and that was when things started to go wrong.Opponents of the Bill argued at length against certain proposed amendments and progress was extremely slow.

We were then all beginning to have doubts about the speed of the progress of the Bill within the current Parliament.

The “hammer blow” came when the Government Whips’ Office stated that they were not prepared to make any more time for the Bill in Committee. The Government had already made it clear that it was not prepared to support the Bill because it had previously announced that it was going to conduct research into the impact of the cohabitation scheme in Scotland. There is apparently, however, still no start date for the research.

Regrettably, therefore, an opportunity has been missed.

The statistics show that approximately half of couples who live together in this country are unmarried. At the same time, there is only limited recognition of this fact.

It is difficult to believe that in the 21st Century, the courts still do not have the power to properly address these problems.

It is even more difficult to believe that the fiction of the “common law wife” remains popular.

August 2009

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