Consultation on unmarried couples sharing assets when they break up

[CruCru]

There’s a thing in the Times today which says that there is a consultation on unmarried couples sharing assets after a break up. Pretty much, if they separate they could be entitled to a share of a house sale and maintenance. They could also be given automatic inheritance rights if their partner dies without leaving a Will.

The proposal is that people who live together for three years or who have a child together would have these rights.

AIBU to be a bit conflicted on this? On the one hand, I really wish schools covered marriage and the rights and responsibilities it gives you. I’ve talked to women (who live with their partners) who were really taken aback to find out that they didn’t automatically get the same rights as married couples. On the other hand, when I was young (late teens / early twenties), I lived with a boyfriend who was a bit of a sponger - I’d have been really annoyed to find out that he was entitled to any of my money when we split up.

This is the situation at the moment. Who knows what we’ll end up with if the government starts messing around.

Countless women make bad choices. It’s frustrating. We can change this law and they will still find a way to leave themselves without financial resources.

the solutions are education, making child maintenance reflect the actual costs of raising a child, and having better support for families with disabled children.

note the first part, education. We need to teach our daughters that adult life is not about fairy tales, it is about planning and legal contracts.

If it is anything to do with David Lammy that says it all really. He will do anything to get attention and is very ambitious and not to be trusted

Treat anything he does ir says with a large pinch of salt!

I don’t like this idea. Lots of people want to live together but not be legally entwined, and I think that should be allowed.

Libby Purves has a comment about this in the Times today:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/aae02ce0-04b7-4def-866b-4be082f216f1?shareToken=6eef3c41b78612ec574301244e4243e6&ver=article

We're both in our 70s and have lived together for 25 years - 2nd time around for both with our own children and GC. He moved into my property and we've since moved once, so, theoretically, I bought this property (in my name with my money) after we met and my will leaves everything to my family apart from £50k to my partner. He never contributed to the paid-off mortgage but pays an amount each week into the pot as a contribution to his living expenses. If I die first, I don't want his family to press him into applying for half my estate - he's NC with them but that wouldn't stop them interfering! At the time, the solicitor said it was a generous will but I feel, if this change goes ahead, that I'll need to check with her again that it's water-tight. I'd have married him if I'd wanted his family to share everything! Something else to fret over.

It’s not obligatory to change your name upon marriage, nor is it obligatory to be given away.

Thanks for sharing.
I think maybe in certain situations we should frown on it.
Too often what is written off as judgemental or moralising is just good sense.

It's fine for organised sensible people where things are equal like joint mortgages.
I know a childless professional couple who are cohabiting in their sixties.
I think the relationship is sound but if they did split you just know everything's covered.

It's fine if both people are on benefits and renting as there's nothing to fight over.

Trouble is that there's a whole sway of people in the middle.

Marriage is a form of control and those people aren't being controlled thus the government is trying to rein them in. Because that's what they do.

There is a concept of sliding not deciding.

To cohabit means sliding into situations where one thing leads to another without thought.

It would be a bloody good thing for some people if they no longer casually cohabited, I can't deny it, but it's not going to save money for the government and it's deeply intrusive so I am totally against cohabitation rights.

They're obviously going to do a cost vs savings thing on this.
I think they'll find that if people think that cohabition is effectively the same as marriage a lot of men and women will not do it.
Is this not obvious?
I mean anybody with the wit to own a house is not going to do it.

Money isn't everything but it is very, very, very important. Nobody's going to risk losing it for a casual cohabitation.

Sorry not RTFT or the proposal, though I’ll do that later. Does this refer to assets built up during the relationship only, much like in a divorce split?

I'm going to be giving feedback on this.
It's probably pointless but what the hell.
I'll focus on the fact that I don't think it'll save money because in spite of this being dressed up as concern that's what this is all about.

Marriage, historically, was about protecting women, not controlling them.

Who loses out if men nomadically impregnate multiple women and move on? Why is bigamy banned? Without marriage, historically, women had no recourse to hold a father to his responsibilities. So this was why it became an expectation (across many different cultures) to get married before having children, to protect mothers from the father fucking off.

Then a certain wave of feminists decided this expectation was too constraining, or too religious, forgetting that the main purpose is that it protects women. Now we have situations where unmarried mothers are abandoned with too little financial support.

The obvious solutions are 1. Beef up child maintenance so it's more money and better enforced and 2. Promote no-frills marriage before having children.

Bring back shotgun weddings basically

Edit to clarify - I consider myself a very staunch feminist myself in that I want to help protect women's interests, rather than a misguided ideology around "choice" being paramount

In any case, this proposed new law is the opposite of choice, it's basically marrying people together without their consent.

If the problem is trying to remediate the issue of people not getting married when it would be in their interests to... then just encourage them to get married! Put on govt-funded TV ads about it! But that wouldn't feel left-wing would it.

I don't think child-free adults ought to have any sort of financial claim on other adults, except their employers. Marriage draws up a contract so it's all pre-agreed.

Beefing up child maintenance is a much better solution.

Marriage was too constraining and religious. That’s not something that a “certain wave” of feminists just decided. I also disagree that the main purpose was protecting women. It was about protecting assets and the ownership of children, from the male perspective.

It was mostly constraining on the men.

Which women actually wanted to be bigamists? It's men who needed preventing from doing that.

You could run TV ads promoting marriage in a way that didn’t appear conservative and paternalistic if you focussed on the legal rights and benefits to couples, rather than making it about morals or institutions. It doesn’t have to be a left versus right dichotomy.

In many cultures women ceased to exist as independent legal entities on marriage and had no claim on their own children should the marriage end in divorce. That’s constraining.

Yes, I think you're actually agreeing with me here.

It's the no-frills, legal contract marriage that I'm wanting to promote. No dress, no vicar, just turn up and sign the paper.

That's how to protect mothers. And yes I feel strongly that being anti-marriage is more anti-women than anti-establishment.

Who won out when marriage became untrendy? Feckless fathers.

True, there are various cases that have been discussed in detail on 'the other' board, if anybody is interested - I'm not going to derail by going over them again here, but in my opinion, they show the official spin that the Australian government put on the issue, which thankfully differs from what we are now seeing in the UK, at least following the Supreme Court judgment.

When it comes down to it, all of this is 'opinion' - ergo you won't find any scientific data to 'prove' that either 'protecting those with marriage who have chosen not to marry by treating them as married regardless' or 'forcing unmarried people to give up their individual rights to to not be treated financially as though they were married' is objectively 'correct'.

OK. That's not the case here and hasn't for years, and is so irrelevant to this proposed law. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make... that's equivalent to uk local council candidates referring to their views on Palestine.

We are talking about marriage vs cohabitation in the UK. Women being oppressed in misogynistic societies are unaffected by whether or not a British woman gets married.

Yes I agree

Marriage confers rights and responsibilities. For some people, it's the right choice, not for others

Some people choose to cohabit precisely because they don't wish partners to have access to their assets. And they should be able to do that

Agree people should have a better understanding of the implications of being married (or not). Too many people think it's "just a piece of paper". (Usually women who secretly want marriage but partner doesn't wish to marry)

And in those cultures, do unmarried women fare any better?? I doubt it.

The concept of marriage is clearly not the main issue there.

@Kingdomofsleep I was talking about the history of marriage as I thought you were as well. My point was that marriage historically and really not that long ago meant restrictions on women legally, reducing them from being fully independent members of society. That’s what I would regard as constraining, rather than issues around stopping bigamy or fathers not being responsible for their children. Feminists didn’t just decide that marriage was constraining, it actually was.

Anyway I think this new proposal doesn’t help and I certainly don’t want it applied to me and my relationship against my will. “No frills” marriage already exists and has done for decades and making fathers responsible for their children already doesn’t depend on the relationship status or whether the couple were ever married. So this proposal will not help this situation, and may in fact make it worse as cohabiting men could claim more assets from women when a relationship breaks down and remove even more from their own children.

Yes this. The only way I can see it being workable and actually helpful is if it is exclusively for a partner who has left work to look after children. So a stay at home parent who has been working in the home with no legal protection. Even then I think it should be a capped amount per year, e.g. the max claim is 5k x number of years or something so they aren't left with nothing.

Agree about education though. Kids should be presented with realistic scenarios where pregnant women are made homeless because they were unmarried. And a parallel situation where they were married. Wouldn't need to be more then a couple of classes.

This no-frills marriage is already available. Surely everybody knows this?

I did it down the register office with two colleagues as witnesses. Cost no more than a few hundred quid. £160 to be precise but this was 20 years ago.

(I don't wish to be disrespectful, but people who can't afford this probably have no assets to fight over anyway.)

@Kingdomofsleep

If a man is commitment phobic, he's not going to move a woman in with him at all if cohabitation is essentially the same as marriage.

It's quite simple, really, if a man has no issues with long- term commitment he'll get married. Why not?

If he does have an issue with long-term commitment then he's hardly going to move in with a woman if he's effectively married by doing so, is he?

I predict that if these plans come about, there'll be more single mother households with men just paying child support. As they should!

So yeah just beef up child support.

Those who continue to cohabit would be affected.