I'm wary of anything that doesn't make sense applied to co-habiting non-couples. Sharing houses with friends and randoms is something that society will need more of if housing keeps being crazy, and it's one thing to say "I'm happy to live with you" and another to say "I'm happy to live with you and if we fall out that gives you rights to half my house and my pension". Aside from the impossibility of declaring whether two people living together are a couple or not except by their own declaration - so the rights would be kind of "opt in" if you had to sign to say you were a couple instead of just friends?
Commitments should be opt-in, not smuggled in. If you made co-habiting rights opt-out, then people who thought they were just considering the implications of physically living with someone might not consider that they were signing away their future too.
I think it's over-simplifying to say the commitments should be opt-in. To be able to opt in you need to know that you've not already got whatever legal protection it was you were thinking of (apparently quite a few people believe there is such a thing as common-law marriage), that you can opt into such things, you need to find out how you go about it, you need to get round to it, and you need both partners to agree.
For a well-informed middle class person in an evenly balanced relationship none of this should be remotely difficult, of course. But of the LTC's sample: “10% said that their partner would not agree, 10% felt that they could not afford legal advice, and 9% said that they were afraid it would cause problems in their relationship”. That's nearly a third of the respondents who'd apparently like to opt in but apparently feel that they cannot.
Declaration isn't such a bad way to distinguish couples from friends living together; indeed it would amount to forcing an explicit statement of opt in or opt out in each case. There are downsides to lying either way, and if you lie you both have to lie, making it unlikely that you'd do so unless the downsides were about equal for both members of the couple.
Abolishing inheritance tax, or allowing housemates to inherit without tax, would stop people claiming to be in relationships when they weren't in order to avoid it. Something else would have to go up but probably not by very much. (I don't feel very strongly either way about inheritance tax personally, so this isn't “...and that's why we should modify/abolish this odious tax” or anything, it's just an observation; though I'll admit to a bias in favor of simplicity.)
PS. You did ask for my view, and the above covers a reasonable amount of it. I do agree with the idea of people being allowed to run their relationships how they like, but the LTC report does make me suspect that there's room for improvement to the “default” situation that applies to people who don't take any special action.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:28 pm (UTC)Commitments should be opt-in, not smuggled in. If you made co-habiting rights opt-out, then people who thought they were just considering the implications of physically living with someone might not consider that they were signing away their future too.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-26 12:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-27 08:10 pm (UTC)I think it's over-simplifying to say the commitments should be opt-in. To be able to opt in you need to know that you've not already got whatever legal protection it was you were thinking of (apparently quite a few people believe there is such a thing as common-law marriage), that you can opt into such things, you need to find out how you go about it, you need to get round to it, and you need both partners to agree.
For a well-informed middle class person in an evenly balanced relationship none of this should be remotely difficult, of course. But of the LTC's sample: “10% said that their partner would not agree, 10% felt that they could not afford legal advice, and 9% said that they were afraid it would cause problems in their relationship”. That's nearly a third of the respondents who'd apparently like to opt in but apparently feel that they cannot.
Declaration isn't such a bad way to distinguish couples from friends living together; indeed it would amount to forcing an explicit statement of opt in or opt out in each case. There are downsides to lying either way, and if you lie you both have to lie, making it unlikely that you'd do so unless the downsides were about equal for both members of the couple.
Abolishing inheritance tax, or allowing housemates to inherit without tax, would stop people claiming to be in relationships when they weren't in order to avoid it. Something else would have to go up but probably not by very much. (I don't feel very strongly either way about inheritance tax personally, so this isn't “...and that's why we should modify/abolish this odious tax” or anything, it's just an observation; though I'll admit to a bias in favor of simplicity.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-27 08:12 pm (UTC)