Hitched up or stitched up?

A straw poll held at the beginning of this week's debate - Hitched Up or Stitched Up? - and repeated at the end found an unshifting majority of more than 80% in favour of rights for cohabitees.

A sea-change from the opposition displayed the last time the issue was debated at the Law Society four years ago.

Mark Harper, a partner at City family law specialist Withers, and also a member of the Law society's family law committee, said the issue of reform could no longer be dodged.

'In one generation, divorces have trebled, marriages have halved, and children born out of wedlock have quadrupled,' he said.

Mr Harper gave several illustrations of instances where the current law treated the break-up of unmarried couples unfairly.

He highlighted the case of a mother of five who was granted the use of a marital home on her break-up, but only until her youngest child reached 21, when the house would revert to her partner.

Mr Harper said successive British governments had postponed the Law Commission's final report on family law.

This procrastination was a 'disgrace', he said.

'Day after day, throughout the country, great injustice is being done because politicians will not grasp the nettle,' he told the audience at Law Society Hall in London.

Sunday Times columnist Melanie Phillips came back hard at these arguments.

Ms Phillips stated that marriage was more than a legal contract, it was a 'personal commitment to a sexual bond'.

Marriage was not a 'bundle of negotiable rights', she continued, adding that, 'cohabitation is not the same thing'.

Ms Phillips said cohabitees deliberately reject marriage, and that they are six times more likely than married couples to separate.

She cautioned against the belief in the stereotype of happy cohabitation offered by 'well-heeled media types'.

Only 36% of the children of cohabitees had parents still together when they reached 16, she said, as opposed to 70% of children of married couples.

According to Ms Phillips, cohabitees were more likely to be individualistic and more independent within their relationships; there was more violence within their relationships, more depression, and more faithlessness.

On the subject of gay cohabitation, Ms Phillips was less combative.

But she concluded that marriage was a bargain between the sexes in which the man forgoes his desire for other women, in return for the woman agreeing to have his children.

Extending rights to cohabitees was, she said an 'assault on marriage', and an infringement of the freedom of cohabitees to live together unshackled by contractual terms.

Angela Mason, the solicitor executive director of the gay rights group Stonewall, said the question was one of rights.

She examined issues which Stonewall comes into contact with: the lack of rights for same sex couples over pensions, mortgages, inheritance tax, intestacy, housing succession and definitions of next of kin.

Ms Mason said the rights gap in these areas was tantamount to discrimination.

She went on to advocate a system of registered partnerships which would take into account the particular circumstances of relationships.

Nicholas Coote, the assistant general secretary of the Catholic bishops conference, said that marriage was the proper environment for raising children.

But he said that where couples were separated, there were circumstances when the Catholic church recognised the benefits of civil divorce.

He said it therefore followed in principal that there should be some safeguard in law for cohabitees and for their children.

The problem, Mr Coote said, was finding a method for doing this, given what he described as the 'fundamental paradox' of couples entering into a marriage while 'insuring against its dissolution'.

Ed Straw, a management consultant and chairman of the relationship counselling charity Relate, said marriage was not undermined by having protections taken away, but by its use and abuse by society.

People's expectations of marriage were, he said, warped by experience and the media.

Statistics in favour of and against marriage could be used to illustrate any point of view, he said, but what was important was not the label 'marriage' but the quality of the people in it.

Mr Straw saw no justification for having a tyranny of marriage, and saw no threat to the institution from rights for cohabitees.

Dr Adrian Rogers, a general practitioner and former director of the Conservative family institute, said marriage was in crisis and was being abolished by the consent of society.

He said children were safer within married families and children of single mothers who cohabited with boyfriends were 33% more likely to suffer abuse - sexual and physical - at home.

Jeremy Fleming