Lee Boyce

Yeah, so this is a kind of idea put together by David Lammy's Ministry of Justice.

There are three and a half million cohabiting couples that are living together but don't get the same rights as you do when you are married.

And what that creates is quite often inheritance problems, problems around property.

You may have children, but you may not be married.

There's all sorts of scenarios in which people aren't married yet.

and don't have the kind of rights and protections potentially you have as a married couple.

You know, it's the modern world.

Things have changed quite a lot in the last 20, 30, 40 years, I would say.

In regards to this, people are probably having long relationships outside of a marriage.

Mr. Lammy himself, who I interviewed about this, and you can hear his voice in a little while,

were saying that basically young people are putting off marriage because it's expensive to get married and something like 51% of children are now born outside of marriage.

So, and I think what they're trying to set out here is better protections, better rights to make sure that family finances aren't blown apart in the case of a breakup, especially protecting children in those kind of circumstances.

Now, this is a consultation, so we'll kind of put that out there that, you know, this isn't...

coming in and it's not coming in in the way, shape and form it's kind of been outlined at the moment.

It will run until the 14th of August.

Mr Lammy was very clear to say that lawyers, academics, charities and the public will be able to have their say on these proposals.

The thing is and one of the kind of

points to it that I kind of was questioning is you know does this kind of water down a little bit the concept of marriage because marriage does give you those rights to finances and I think most of us are aware and know that you know does it make marriage even more of a kind of

not a pointless exercise but it kind of waters down uh the kind of idea of marriage a little bit i think that's one thing that definitely our commenters in this story are talking about and they kind of understand it but there are also circumstances in which it probably makes sense for more rules uh and more rights to come into place as i say in this kind of new modern world i

This is going to throw up potentially some very complicated cases.