Towards the end of last month, the Scottish Government published a consultation on civil partnership in Scotland.
Civil partnership has been available to same sex couples in the UK for a number of years, and is a legal union that provides most of the rights and obligations of married couples.
The consultation follows the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014, which came into force last year and gave same sex couples the right to marry. It also gave couples in an existing Scottish civil partnership the right to change their relationship to a marriage.
While this Act was passing through Parliament, the Scottish Government committed to carrying out a review of civil partnership in Scotland, and the recently published consultation forms part of this review.
Through the consultation exercise, which will run until the 15th December, the Scottish Government is seeking views on three options regarding civil partnership, which are:
- no change, so that civil partnership would remain available for same sex couples only;
- stopping new civil partnerships being registered at some date in the future;
- introducing opposite sex civil partnership in Scotland.
Interestingly, although the Government says it is open to views on the idea of opposite sex civil partnership, it has made it clear it is not in favour of the idea. It believes that demand for such an option would be low; there would be costs involved; and there would be limited recognition of such partnerships out with Scotland.
However, the Government has said that it does not have a view at this stage on which of the other two options should be followed.
It has also clarified that regardless of the outcome of the consultation, those in existing civil partnerships will be able to remain in their civil partnerships if they wish and that these will continue to be recognised by the Scottish Government. There is no obligation on couples to change their civil partnerships to marriage if they do not wish to do so.
The National Records of Scotland has recently published statistics on the take up of marriage and civil partnership across Scotland.
These figures show that:
- In Quarter 2 of 2015, there were eight civil partnerships, 121 fewer than during the second quarter of 2014.
- In Quarter 2 of 2015, there were 7,760 opposite sex marriages.
- In Quarter 2 of 2015, there were 427 same sex marriages (236 of these were changes from civil partnership to marriage and 191 were new marriages).
- In Quarter 1 of 2015, there were 20 civil partnerships, 57 fewer than during the first quarter of 2014.
- In Quarter 1 of 2015, there were 3,427 opposite sex marriages.
- In Quarter 1 of 2015, there were 462 same sex marriages (334 of these were changes from civil partnership to marriage and 128 were new marriages). In 2014, there were 436 (same sex) civil partnerships (compared with 530 in 2013).
- In 2014, there were 28,703 opposite sex marriages.
- In 2014, there were 367 same sex marriages (359 of these were changes from civil partnership to marriage and eight were new marriages).
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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