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Why Not Just Get Married?

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dave50 | 07:58 Thu 30th Aug 2018 | News
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-45348176/bereavement-allowance-widowed-mum-on-why-her-kids-are-penalised
When they knew that he was ill, surely they would have known the consequences of not being married so why not just pop down to the registry office and get married? How long would have taken, twenty minutes, half an hour? What is it about these people who refuse point blank to get married no matter what, what are they trying to prove? I do not understand the mentality, so against marriage but yet will be together for years and have children. Can someone please explain?
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As soon as children are involved, it seems petty and cruel to start casting moral judgement, and enshrining it in law, on the choices of the parents.
Kva....can see some of your point however in a society to be strutted and be fair one has to have rules. If we exploit the rules then why bother with rules? We cannot afford to let anyone take benefits kindly ( ?) given from state funds or else the pot would be empty!

So in my view....if you know the rules you choose to abide by the or not! The choice is yours so if when need be they don't suit your life....choose the right course.

If you don't marry and know you won't receive certain benefits you have made your choice... If you are happy with not receiving anything to help towards your circumstances that's fine. Otherwise keep to the rules and it will be fine. Anyone could say thing about a relationship just to gain whatever....it's proof that's needed IMO and rightly so.
Well apparently she has won her case .
One always needs to provide evidence to claim benefits entitlement. The same would be true of unmarried couples. In the absence of a marriage certificate (or its Civil-Partnership equivalent), I'd expect the required evidence to be somewhat more stringent, which seems fair.

At any rate, it's rather misleading to think that this opens the door for all sorts of spurious claims that will automatically be paid out without requiring supporting evidence, and with no scrutiny.
Andres, I think you must have missed Jim's update this morning, providing details of the ruling?
My point is Dunnitall with the greatest respect I think the rules are somewhat outdated and need overhauling, to accommodate the increasingly common scenario of people living together for years and years having families, paying taxes and then not being able to benefit from their own contributions because we are still basing commitment in terms of marriage only and that's clearly wrong. Also the child who is affected by this has no say in if its parents are married or not, so that in itself is discriminatory.
Personally until I met my present partner I couldn't see the point in getting married, now that has changed but not because of any legal scenario, I'd only marry someone if I really wanted to marry them.
As a side-note, it's worth pointing out that it was only in the late 1990s that the various bereavement payments were finally made available to widowers, rather than just to widowed women.
“…the state still doesn't recognise polygamous relationships,”

Oh yes it does, provided they are contracted outside the UK. Not only that, keen to demonstrate its usual munificence with other people’s money, the government shells out benefits to additional “wives” of such set-ups. Here’s a briefing paper deposited in the House of Commons library in June 2017. (You probably need to copy and paste this into your browser as it links to a .pdf document):

researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05051/SN05051.pdf

And here’s a couple of extracts from it. Firstly, on recognition:

“Polygamous marriages which take place in another country, and are valid there, may be recognised as being valid in the UK.”

And on benefits:

“The basic position is that some benefits can be paid, in certain cases, in respect of more than one spouse. Rules enabling the payment of some benefits in respect of some polygamous marriages have been in force for some time; for example, in relation to Income Support, the current rules have applied since 1987.”

“For income-replacement benefits such as income support, income-based jobseeker's allowance and income-related employment and support allowance, the husband and first wife claim as a couple. Subsequent wives receive an additional sum which is less than the single person rate.”

As far as Bereavement Benefit (BB) goes the “DWP Decision Makers’ Guide” says this about spouses:

“A spouse is a person married in the conventional sense to the other spouse, including a same sex spouse , following a proper legally recognised ceremony.”

Since the Commons paper states that polygamous marriages are recognised it follows that a husband with multiple spouses will be entitled to BB for each one that dies and each wife will be entitled to BB when he dies.

Further than that, it will probably not be too long before polygamous marriages contracted in the UK will be countenanced (at least if this load of waffle, from the same Commons Paper, ever comes to pass):

“The Law Commission has also given initial consideration to the issue of religious marriages that are not legally valid. It published its scoping study in December last year setting out the parameters of a potential review of the law concerning how and where people can marry in England and Wales, following consultation with a wide range of religious organisations and other interested parties. The scoping study concluded that this was one of a number of issues that might be ameliorated through a fairer and more coherent framework for marriage.”

So, legal polygamous marriages are not long in the making and BB will be shelled out for all the combinations thereof.

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