Legal rights for people who ‘Live Apart Together’?

Abstract

About 10% of adults in Britain have a living apart together (LAT) relationship; they are nearly always administratively and legally defined as single but in fact they have a partner who lives elsewhere. The question then arises, should LAT couples have access to legal rights and protection in the same way as proposed (in Britain) or achieved (in other jurisdictions) for unmarried cohabitants? Using both a national survey and in-depth interviews, we find that a significant proportion of LAT partners extend substantial levels of care and support both to each other and, if relevant, to their partners' dependent children. For other LAT partners levels of support are lower, or even absent. Similarly, about a third of our interviewees thought LAT relationships should have given legal rights, a third thought these should depend on circumstances, while the final third were opposed to any extension of legal rights or thought this unnecessary. A number of overarching themes surrounded this issue in interviewees' narratives - the presence of children, the existence of commitment, the longevity of the relationship, the logistics of organising a legal system, and the possibility that some might take advantage. We suggest that ‘opt-in’ legal provisions could provide a model for any extension of legal rights to LAT relationships in the UK.

Keywords:

• Living apart together
• LAT
• partners
• family law
• care
• Britain

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Anne Barlow for comments, and for alerting us to the legal provisions in Australia. Thanks also to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), grant number RES-062-23-2213.

3 One interviewee did not provide information on this topic, giving an effective sample of 49.

Notes

1. As far as we are aware there is no other literature on this issue.

2. The questions asked in the 2001 and 2011 surveys, while similar, are not identical (the question text and answer options were different, and the questions were fielded on a different interview mode – self-completion in 2001, and face to face in 2011) so we can only use broad comparisons as an indication of similarity and difference.

3. We defined levels of care as follows:

1-Inclusive: regular and comprehensive, includes material (time, labour, finance) and emotional care.

2-Substantial: much care, but not comprehensive.

3-Important: care only in one or two forms, sometimes occasional or patchy.

4-Nominal: prompted or hypothetical care, only mentioned when asked directly or prompted to do so.

5-Absent: no care between partners mentioned or stated as absent.

4. Emma believed in the ‘common law marriage’ myth that unmarried cohabitants are entitled to a certain set of rights.

5. This view was partially addressed in the extension of marriage like rights to same sex couples in Britain in 2003, through civil partnership, by the argument that same sex couples could not choose marriage even if they wanted to. Heterosexual couples can, hence in this view a similar argument does not apply to heterosexual unmarried cohabitants or (by extension) to couples who live apart.