What it means for children and families
A guide on how to respond for parents, supporters and the public
The Government is rebuilding how marriage is made in law- the biggest change since the nineteenth century.
“Tying the Knot: Reforming weddings law in England and Wales” was published on 16 July 2026 and is open for anyone to answer until 24 September 2026.
The headlines are about weddings on beaches and canal boats. The substance is this: under these proposals a bride could be married without saying one word, in the secrecy of a private home, on an officiant’s judgement of what her silence meant – and the Government wants to write that into the marriage law of England and Wales.
Alongside it: the couple’s promise removed from the legal words, weddings handed to a paid celebrant industry, ministers of religion put on five-yearly state licences – and the biggest gap in family law, the unregistered religious marriage, left exactly where it is.
Family Education Trust (FET) researches why families break down and how children flourish. Everything we know says the same thing: children do best when the two people who made them are married to each other and stay that way. Weddings law is where that bond begins in law. So we read all 171 pages asking the only question that matters to us – what does this do for children? It fails them, and this guide shows where, in the Government’s own words and numbers.
You can answer as few or as many of the 39 questions as you like, and responses genuinely shape the Bill. The question-by-question guidance starts on page 7, and there is a twenty-minute route on page 8.
Six things every parent and supporter should know
- The Government’s own “family test” for this reform never says “mother” or “father”. Every new policy gets a family test – an official assessment of what it does to families. This one runs to thirty-one paragraphs about family formation, stability and children, and not once does it use the word ‘mother’, ‘father’ or ‘biological’. A marriage reform assessed for its impact on families that cannot name the two people every child comes from has forgotten what marriage is for. That is not a slip of drafting. It is the worldview of the whole exercise, and everything below flows from it.
- The couple would promise nothing. The entire legal vow would be: “I [name] accept you [name] as my[husband/wife /spouse]”- with “spouse” offered, in the Government’s words, for couples who “do not identify with” husband and wife. Nothing about staying. Nothing about faithfulness. Across 171 pages, “forsaking all others” never appears. Yet the same paper calls marriage a “serious and lifelong commitment” thirteen times and – for the first time in English law – would give the officiant a legal duty to uphold marriage as lifelong. The hired celebrant must proclaim permanence, and the couple never promise it. For a child, the whole point of marriage is permanence promised out loud in front of everyone: the public reason to believe mum and dad are staying. The Government’s own family test records that married parents are markedly less likely to separate. If marriage is lifelong – their word- let the couple say it.
- A bride’s spoken “I do” would become optional. In religious and belief ceremonies, legal consent could be given “through actions”- a ritual, a gesture – with no spoken word at all, so long as the officiant and witnesses “share an understanding” of what it meant. The paper’s own example of such a ritual is the nikah exchange in Islamic marriage, and nowhere in its pages is either party required to say a single word at their own wedding. For a girl in a closed household – a Muslim teenager at her family’s arranged nikah, in the paper’s own example it means this: veiled and silent through her own ceremony, held if her family chooses in the family’s own home, she could leave it legally married on the officiant’s and her family’s account of what her gestures meant. The Government concedes in the same paper that home weddings “could make it harder to identify forced, predatory, sham marriages or wider abuse”- and proposes them anyway. The spoken word is the oldest safeguard in weddings law – the one moment a coerced bride can be heard, or be noticed going silent, after the pressure at home has done its work. The Government’s own Forced Marriage Unit reports that 71 per cent of the victims in its cases are women- and that 83 cases in 2024, more than a third of its caseload, involved victims aged 17 and under -children.
Every previous review told government to raise religious-only marriage to the standard of the law. These proposals lower the law to the standard of the practice those reviews condemned – consent without words, marriage without the register. A law that let silence marry a woman would let silence marry a girl. A marriage entered under coercion is a family built on coercion – and those families’ children are the ones our research follows through every bleak outcome that follows. - Children of unregistered religious marriages get nothing. Six in ten women married in Islamic ceremonies in Britain have no legal marriage at all- the Government cites the survey itself. When those families break, mother and children learn there was never a marriage in law: no financial remedy, no widow’s provision, nothing. The Home Office’s independent review said in 2018 exactly what to do – register the marriage with the ceremony, with real duties on celebrants.
The Casey Review said up to 100,000 such marriages may exist, and recommended that every marriage, of every faith, be registered. Eight years on, this consultation – handed 171 pages and the perfect opportunity – requires nothing. Easier legal weddings, yes, and we welcome that. Still voluntary – and it is precisely where compliance fails today that children are most exposed. - Weddings become an industry, and the experiment has already failed. The Law Commission’s own estimate, printed in the consultation, is that paid commercial celebrants would take 50,000 weddings a year – 22.6 per cent- with the state registrar’s share falling to 11.8 per cent. Scotland shows the destination: two decades after liberalising, humanist celebrants conduct more Scottish weddings than every Christian denomination combined – 8,142 against the Church of Scotland’s 1,252 in 2024 – while total marriages sit at
pre-pandemic levels in long-term decline.
Australia went to celebrants in 1973: the marriage rate fell for fifty years. New Zealand, celebrant-based throughout, has half the marriage rate it had in 2000. Changing who conducts weddings has never, anywhere, produced more marriages. And more marriages not rebranded ceremonies – are what children need. - The cost story is not honest. The Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor, David Lammy, says “the cost of weddings puts this commitment out of reach”. The law is not what costs £20,000. Getting legally married costs about £170 in fees – £46.50 each to give notice, a £62 register office ceremony, a £12.50 certificate – and about £105 in a chapel whose minister charges nothing. The £20,000 average is, in the consultation’s own words at page 68, “largely driven by optional services chosen by couples”. Venue hire alone is “around £6,000” by the Government’s own press release – and ceremony fees are 2 to 3 per cent of what couples spend, on the budget breakdown of Bridebook, the Government’s own source. Its impact assessment admits there is “no quantitative evidence” the reforms will produce a single extra wedding, and that the total “may remain stable or continue to decline”. Even its headline prize collapsed: £535 million, 12,000 jobs and £100 million for the public purse were announced in October – by July the figure was £238.5 million and the jobs and public purse had vanished, with no explanation anywhere. Families on low incomes deserve better than this. The marriage gap between richer and poorer parents has doubled in thirty years- among lower-income parents of newborns, marriage has fallen from 68 per cent in 1988 to 35 per cent in 2019. That is a genuine crisis for children, and it will not be touched by a £62 fee or a beach. It is driven by a culture that prices commitment at £20,000 and a state that penalises couples for marrying – and this reform changes neither.