In a guest post, Russell Sandberg looks at the Law Commission’s final proposals on reforming weddings law in England and Wales.

Introduction

Amidst an unprecedented heatwave and the turbulence of the Conservative Party leadership battle, the publication of the Law Commission’s final Report on its wedding law project has been somewhat overshadowed. Those who have seen coverage of the Report may well have experienced a sense of déjà vu given that the schema presented is very similar to that presented in its 2020 Consultation Paper. This is not a bad thing: the system proposed in that Paper was sound and would make significant improvements over the current outdated and discriminatory law on marriage.

The final Report, entitled ‘Celebrating Marriage: A New Weddings Law’, is an exhaustive and dense document that is almost 500 pages in length and which will merit detailed study. This will include the proposed focus and reform of the position on preliminaries, the detailed proposals on validity and offences and the extent to which the revised reforms would mitigate the issue of unregistered religious marriages/religious only marriage. The following is based on a webinar presented to the Association of Independent Celebrants on 22nd July and so reflects on two aspects of particular concern to that audience: the proposed move to regulating officiants and a short reflection on the likelihood of reform. Given that the main recommendations are familiar and have already been summarised in an earlier post, the following will highlight some initial observations from reading the Report, focusing on these two dimensions.

Officiants

Central to the Law Commission’s proposals is the creation of the new role of officiant. Continue reading →