Unmarried couples to gain property rights and possible wider implications

She does have rights, if she has been paying things like the mortgage, repairs etc. then she has acquired rights in property law.

Codifying that particular situation for clarity would be more sensible than making everyone default in to a weird quazi-marriage situation with legal implications to leave just from living together.

Just posted the response document above

https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/a-fairer-end-to-relationships-consultation/consultation/

Even now in the case of divorce, the house being in his sole name doesn't mean she wouldn't be awarded a settlement. That was the benefit of marriage for her over just cohabiting so it probably was not as bleak as you thought.

Years ago the company I worked for used to share a room in a library with the CAB. We are semi rural so we’d travel, as did the CAB, to do like one a week clinics in different areas.
one day a distressed woman turned up looking for the CAB but it wasn’t their day. Her husband had left her for a younger woman. The house was in his name and she’d never worked. I’ll never forget her distress as 22 year old ignorant me struggled to understand and advise. I tried to direct her to housing support at the council, suggested she contact family, get legal advice etc.
i think of her often and wish I’d been able to help more.
but I made sure when I married to have separate accounts and house in both names.
BIL co habits. I don’t know what a female version of a cock lodger is but his partner is one.
excuse typos as on phone.

Thanks for the link. I will try to read it fully today and respond to the questionnaire.
At first glance it is infuriating how it has been spun as 'rights for cohabiting couples' when the reality is one party of a couple risks losing a lot in favour of the other just because they shared a house/were in a relationship for 3 years.
I resent that we have to do politicians' jobs for them. They should be putting forward coherent legislation with the pros and cons considered.

Thanks although am I being really silly or how do you actually reply?

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/a-fairer-end-to-relationships/a-fairer-end-to-relationships-consultation-document

here is the consultation document again. Please reply if you feel strongly.

I wish I knew the answer.
Bombard them with emails about it. There must be links. That's what I'm doing. Be a pain in the ass. If nothing else, you'll feel you're doing something.

I totally agree that this is wholly wrong for many reasons, but as they're only really attempting this to save money, if they realise it may not, they'll stop.

I find that sometimes the more outrageous parts of things get dispensed with pretty quickly.

Nobody sane would argue that anybody who cohabits with a partner where they have no children together and one of them contributes nothing financially should be entitled to anything if they split up.

Having said that, the Australians and Canadians have done this but hopefully there's more sense here.

The whole thing is a shit show. Do we know if it’s definitely happening or what steps does it still have to go through?

You can make a claim against someone who is married.
the consultation is linked somewhere in the thread

Good point. Id also like to know how it will work when a party is cohabiting with one person and is married to another ?

This scenario is incredibly common, we have all read posts / know in RL of women who say they can’t get married because their fiancé is “ technically “ still married.

In fact every man I know who has left his wife and children ( which is a lot ) has moved in with a new partner before he and his wife are divorced.

What about the men who “ work away from home “ and are cohabiting with more than one women in different parts of the country , while still not legally divorced from the woman he calls his “ ex wife “?

Excellent question that will need to be considered.

One of the proposals is for unmarried partners to inherit when one dies intestate. They already can, so I presume the idea is to alter the existing provisions for what happens when a person in this situation dies.

Is a period of cohabitation going to automatically revoke previously made wills, as marriage does?

@BendoftheBeginning Yes I am.

Are you going to feed back on the consultation? I’m sorry to keep banging on about this, but when we fed back our concerns on on self ID we made even Maria Miller pause to reconsider, and that was the start of the that government and the ones that followed changing their minds.

Yeah.
And all done under the guise of 'protecting' women too.
Cheeky feckers.

It's not the right thing to do.
And it won't be drafted properly.
There is also no such thing as common law marriage.

Said this on the other thread too, but I'm generally mistrustful of any discussion on this subject that focuses only on marriage giving people rights, and doesn't mention that it also takes them away. The status quo means unmarried cohabitants also have rights that married ones don't, generally about their assets, and those rights are clearly very important to some of them.

However we do it, we're going to end up with some people who are disadvantaged. I'm not persuaded that creating a different set of problems to the ones that exist now is necessarily going to be an improvement.

Yeah. Funny that, isnt it?

I agree. Just educate people as I do not want my partner having rights over the house I paid off shortly after he moved in out of my wages alone and which I continue to maintain financially without his input. This is the main reason I do not get married so don't take me choices away because others don't do their research.

Apologies, wasn't meant as an insult, just that some posters are men, and I didn't want to assume.

Of course.
And don't call me 'they'.

In theory this is the right thing to do, but I think the drafting will be vital to making it work and ensuring it's not a complete shit show. I'd be particularly keen to see protections when one partner has contributed and they have kids and have effectively been common law married. Cheeky CL don't need any cover. I suspect Jess Philips was behind the drafting and she will have done it with protecting vulnerable women at front of mind.

I wasn't aware of it at the time but looking back that allowed all the subsequent overreach by Stonewall et al.