Marriage Foundation response to the government consultation: “Tying the Knot: Reforming weddings law in England and Wales“

(This is the general introduction to our response. We have also addressed the 39 consultation questions, to which responses are available on request.)

Marriage Foundation welcomes the Government’s intention to simplify weddings law, remove unnecessary restrictions and strengthen safeguards against forced, predatory and sham marriages. We particularly welcome the proposed strengthening of the civil preliminaries process and the recognition that registration officers already have an important safeguarding role.

However, we believe the consultation has missed a more fundamental option which should be properly considered before legislation is finalised: universal civil marriage. The Government’s proposals retain the basic assumption that the state should regulate the wedding ceremony itself, albeit through a more flexible system based around officiants. We suggest that the Government should instead distinguish between marriage as a legal status and a wedding as a celebration.

The state’s legitimate interest is in ensuring that a marriage is legally valid, freely entered into, properly registered and protected against abuse. There is no equivalent need for the state to regulate how, where or by whom a couple subsequently celebrates that marriage.

Under such a system, every couple would complete the same civil registration process, including the necessary identity, eligibility, consent and safeguarding checks, and the marriage would then be registered by the existing civil registration service. The couple would thereafter be free to hold whatever religious, humanist, cultural or personal celebration they wished, wherever they wished and with whoever they wished.

This is not an untested or uniquely British idea. France, Germany and Switzerland all require the legal marriage to be conducted through the civil authorities, with religious ceremonies being separate from the creation of the legal marriage. In France, marriage is celebrated before an officer of civil status at the mairie and a religious marriage cannot precede it. In Germany, marriage may only be contracted before a registrar, while a religious ceremony is optional. In Switzerland, marriage must be concluded at the civil status office following a preparatory procedure.

It is notable that none of these three European systems is mentioned as a comparator in the Government’s consultation. Nor does the consultation appear to consider universal civil marriage as an alternative model at all. Yet these examples demonstrate that separating the legal formation of marriage from the subsequent religious or personal celebration is an established approach elsewhere in Europe.

This would provide a genuinely universal system while avoiding the need to create an extensive new regulatory framework for wedding officiants. The Government’s present proposals contemplate entry requirements, training, monitoring, accountability, a fit-and-proper test, conflict-of-interest rules and potentially a central regulator for officiants.

Universal civil marriage would also provide an exceptional once-in-a-generation opportunity for Government to explain publicly what marriage is, what it is not, and why it matters. A major change in marriage law would inevitably attract substantial public and media attention, including debate about the future role of the established Church. That attention could be used to make one fundamental point unmistakably clear: there is no such thing as common-law marriage in England and Wales.

This matters because the Government’s recent consultation on cohabitation rights found that 47% of people believe, incorrectly, that living together creates a form of common-law marriage (Ministry of Justice, 2026). Universal civil marriage would provide a natural opportunity to correct that misunderstanding: everyone would know that the legal status of marriage is acquired through one clear civil process, and that a wedding celebration, however elaborate or unconventional, is not itself what creates the legal status.

This could materially change the context in which policy on cohabitation is considered. If people understand that cohabitation does not confer the legal status of marriage, and understand clearly the rights and responsibilities which accompany marriage, the argument that additional legal rights are required because couples are simply unaware of their status becomes substantially weaker. This does not resolve the separate question of what protections should properly apply to cohabitants, particularly where children or vulnerability are involved, but it would address one important source of confusion identified by Government itself.

It would also provide an opportunity to communicate the wider importance of marriage. The Government’s stated aim in the present consultation is to strengthen the institution of marriage. Our recent doctoral research provides new evidence relevant to that objective: the greater stability of married parents cannot readily be explained simply by the characteristics of people who marry (Benson, 2026). Our findings indicate that marriage itself may contribute to stability, with psychological mechanisms such as increased dedication, cognitive consistency and the signalling of commitment providing plausible explanations (Gawronski & Brannon, 2019; Rowthorn, 2002; Stanley et al., 2010). This makes the reform of marriage law about considerably more than the mechanics of wedding ceremonies.

The consultation currently places considerable emphasis on the regulation of weddings, locations and officiants, while the importance of marriage itself receives much less attention. We believe the emphasis should be reversed: the state should take marriage seriously by protecting and properly registering the legal institution, while leaving couples free to decide how they celebrate it.

In conclusion, we believe the Government should pause before embarking on a new regulatory framework which could take at least five years to implement, involve substantial public expenditure and require an entirely new layer of officiants, with associated initial training, ongoing monitoring, authorisation and complaints procedures. Such a system risks making an already complicated process even more complicated, while creating new opportunities for disagreement and dispute and potentially making marriage less accessible and attractive.

Marriage Foundation’s alternative genuinely simplifies the system. It uses the existing civil registration service and its established expertise to provide one clear legal process for everyone, while removing the need for the state to regulate the wedding celebration itself. It would reduce rather than add to regulatory and administrative costs, provide the same legal safeguards to everyone, and allow couples complete freedom over how and where they celebrate.

In short: one simple system for everyone, from the Royal Family downwards.

Dr Harry Benson, Research Director Marriage Foundation, 22 September 2026

References

• Benson, H. (2026). The timing of marriage and union dissolution among first time parents in the UK [PhD thesis]. University of Bristol.
• Gawronski, B., & Brannon, S. M. (2019). What is cognitive consistency, and why does it matter? In Cognitive dissonance: Reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology (2nd ed.). (pp. 91–116). American Psychological Association.
• Ministry of Justice. (2026). A fairer end to relationships: consultation document. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/a-fairer-end-to-relationships/a-fairer-end-to-relationships-consultation-document
• Rowthorn, R. (2002). Marriage as a signal. In The Law and Economics of Marriage and Divorce (pp. 132–156).
• Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Whitton, S. W. (2010). Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 2(4), 243–257.