FET response to The Wedding Consultation
July 20, 2026
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.
What the consultation actually proposes
The paper follows the Law Commission's 2022 report, with departures. In outline:
- An officiant-based system. The law stops regulating buildings and starts licensing people: registrars, ministers nominated by their denominations, humanist and other belief-organisation celebrants, paid independent celebrants and ships' officers.
- Weddings anywhere - beaches, forests, private homes, canal boats, cruise ships at sea provided the officiant judges the spot safe and "dignified". The old requirement that weddings be open to public view goes; notices move online.
- Consent by ritual in religious and belief ceremonies: no spoken words required if officiant and witnesses "share an understanding" of the action Anew legal vow for civil weddings: "I [name] accept you [name] as my [husband / wife / spouse]"- nothing lifelong, nothing exclusive.
- Commercial celebrants solemnising legal marriages for the first time- the one place the Government goes beyond the Law Commission.
- A state "dignity framework" with a regulator, a "fit and proper person" test, complaints, five-yearly re-licensing for every officiant except Anglican clergy, and the power to strike ministers off - with no protection for religious belief anywhere in the scheme, and congregations needing 100 member households (up from 20, the rule since 1837) before they may nominate an officiant.
- Stronger checks against forced, predatory and sham marriage at the notice stage: a private compulsory interview, notices published online, pre-emptive caveats. These are genuine improvements, and FET supports them.
Respond online at https://consult.justice.gov.uk/family-justice/reforming-weddings-law-in-england-and-wales or by email to weddingslawconsultation@justice.gov.uk by 24 September 2026.
Two scales of evidence
FET has argued for more than fifty years that policy on the family should follow the evidence. This consultation shows why we have to keep saying it.
Every pro-marriage finding in the Government's own papers arrives wrapped in a caveat. Married parents are less likely to separate - "Whilst the research base has not identified a causal relationship between marriage and stability...". Married couples are more likely to have children - "A causal link does not appear to have been identified".
The Marriage Foundation, whose data the family test itself relies on, is footnoted as having "a distinctly pro-marriage agenda"- as though forty years of peer-used research needed a health warning.
Then watch the claim the Government needs. Its equality assessment asserts that giving cohabitants marriage-like rights does "not have a negative impact on marriage rates" - the exact question its parallel cohabitation consultation turns on- and supports it with one study, from 2007, nineteen years old. No caveat. No hedge. No footnote about anyone's agenda.
One standard of scepticism for marriage's benefits, another for marriage's dismantling. If the department has a reason for weighing the scales differently, it should publish it. If not, it should weigh everything the same - and on the same scales, its own evidence makes our case: children do best in stable families, married parents are more likely to stay, and a reform that produces celebrants rather than marriages does nothing for either.
And this is one half of a programme. The same Ministry's cohabitation consultation marriage-like rights for couples who never married - closes on 14 August, six weeks before this one.
Marriage-like rights without marriage on one side, marriage without the promise on the other. Children need the real thing, and both consultations deserve an answer that says so.
One law for every family
Nothing in this consultation matters more for vulnerable children than the reform it leaves out. The Government's own evidence defines the problem: six in ten women married in Islamic ceremonies are not legally married, and nearly three in ten do not know it.
The Court of Appeal has faced what that means- a couple married by nikah for eighteen years, with children, whom the law held had never been married at all. The 2018 independent review found these women left "without spousal rights and benefits", reliant on sharia councils "which lack legal authority and sometimes exhibit poor practice". This spring an investigation reported a London centre teaching that a virgin bride's silence counts as consent.
And with registration voluntary, plural religious marriage stays invisible too - the Casey Review found "unregistered polygamy" to be "more commonplace than might be expected".
The answer has been on the table for a decade, from every direction: Dame Louise Casey - all marriages, of every faith, registered and legally valid; The Home Office review - civil registration before or with the religious ceremony, with duties on celebrants; Southall Black Sisters- every religious marriage registered by law; The National Secular Society campaigns under "one wedding law for all".
When secular feminists, Muslim women's advocates, Christians and a Home Office review all reach the same conclusion, a Government genuinely reforming weddings law would act on it. This one does not even discuss it - universal registration was excluded from the Law Commission's terms of reference before the work began, and this consultation inherits the exclusion in silence.
For FET the point is children: a child's family should never rest on a marriage the law cannot see. Every response should say so.
What we welcome
FET says plainly what is right here, because it is right and because it makes the criticism unanswerable: The stated objective - strengthening marriage - and the family test's own finding that "marriage appears to be associated with greater family stability for children".
The stronger notice-stage safeguards against forced, predatory and sham marriages: the private compulsory interview, the pre-emptive caveat, the 28-day period kept. Making it easier for a religious ceremony to be the legal wedding through nominated officiants - the right mechanism, wrongly left voluntary Keeping state registrars out of religious content.
How to respond - the questions that matter
Go to https://consult.justice.gov.uk/family-justice/reforming-weddings-law-in-england-and-wales-
or email weddingslawconsultation@justice.gov.uk - by 24 September 2026.
Answer only the questions you choose. And write in your own words: government departments have form for discounting what they decide is a campaign. One analysis on the Ministry of Justice's own website counts campaign responses "as one"; another department once counted 134 campaign responses "as a single response... in accordance with consultation guidance"; and this month the Department for Education said responses showing "coordinated engagement activity" had been "taken into account in the analysis". Your own paragraph, in your own
voice, cannot be filed as a copy.
Questions 1 to 4 (safeguarding checks): support them- and say the in-person interview must always be genuinely private, with any interpreter independent of the family.
Question 5 (consent by "actions"): oppose. Spoken, witnessed consent must remain the legal minimum for every wedding in England and Wales- or, for a party genuinely unable to speak, consent personally signed by that party. Ritual can accompany the words - it must never replace them. Consent must never rest on an officiant's reading of a silent bride's gestures. Silence must never be able to marry anyone- least of all a frightened girl.
Question 6 (the required words): demand a rea vow. Words that carry what the Government itself says marriage is - lifelong and exclusive- with husband and wife as the default terms. A child's security should not rest on a form of words that promises nothing.
Questions 8 to 15 (the "dignity framework"): support the standards, name what they replace. Yes to solemnity and the bans on stunts and drinking. But for two centuries dignity was built in- a public ceremony, a recognised place, the community as witness. Strip that out and the state must hire a regulator to adjudicate dignity wedding by wedding. An institution is being swapped for an inspection regime.
Question 16 (religious content in civil ceremonies): keep the line clear. Families need to know what a ceremony is. A civil wedding with borrowed religious elements, run by a paid celebrant, blurs exactly the line the law exists to keep clear.
Question 17 (registrars barred from religious content): support.
Question 20 (weddings in private homes):the frightened bride test. The Government concedes in its own paper that home weddings "could make it harder to identify forced, predatory, sham marriages or wider abuse". For a coerced woman, the family home is the hardest room in Britain to say no in - every witness chosen by the family, no public doorway. If home weddings proceed, the officiant must see each party alone on the day, away from relatives, with any interpreter independent of the family- and must have a clear duty to stop the ceremony if free consent is in doubt. This is where Question 5 matters most: in that room, her spoken word may be the only voice she is allowed. The law must insist on hearing it.
Questions 21, 22, 28 and 29 (weddings at sea and on cruise ships):oppose. Marriage is the foundation of family life, not a holiday product- and the impact assessment's own selling point is that a UK ship register offering same-sex weddings would hold a "comparative advantage" over Bermuda's. That sentence says what this reform thinks marriage is for.
Question 23 (the officiant's duty to uphold marriage's dignity and significance): support both ways. If the officiant must uphold marriage by law, no officiant should ever be found unfit or struck off for believing in it- including the belief, held by millions of families, that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Protection for that belief must be written into the Act itself.
Question 25 (raising the congregation threshold from 20 to 100 households): oppose.
Twenty households has stood since 1837. A five-fold rise strips small congregations- the village chapel, the church plant - of the right to appoint an officiant when theirs retires. Local congregations are where families are married, supported and held together. The state should not be sizing them.
Question 26 (a statutory list of excluded organisations): oppose open-ended lists. A blacklist with a blank "Other" box, next to an undefined "fit and proper" test, is a lever waiting for a future hand.
Question 27 (commercial independent celebrants): oppose. The Government's own evidence: celebrant fees are "broadly comparable" to registrars'- no saving for families and a conflicts-of-interest regime is needed precisely because the celebrant is selling something. Solemnising the start of a family is a public trust, not a trade.
Questions 30 to 33 (fit and proper, five-yearly licences, sanctions): oppose state licensing of ministers. The Law Commission itself recommended against periodic renewal. Re-licensing the clergy of every denomination but one, every five years, against undefined standards, is not weddings administration - it is state supervision of the communities that marry and sustain families.
Question 39 (the regulator): whoever regulates, bind them in statute with the protections above. And in every free-text box, the reform the paper never asks about: register every religious marriage- civil registration before or alongside the ceremony, as the 2018 review recommended, so no mother and no child are ever again left outside the law's protection.
Respond in twenty minutes
Short of time? Answer three questions - 5 (keep spoken consent), 6 (put the promise in the vow) and 20 (protect the frightened bride) - in your own words, then add the registration demand in the final box. Twenty minutes, and your voice is in the record the Bill must answer.
Then two more steps. The cohabitation consultation closes first, on 14 August- answer it too, at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/a-fairer-end-to-relationships
And tell your MP you have responded to both: two minutes at https://www.writetothem.com
What to avoid
The case is strong - let's not weaken it with overstatement:
- Not "church weddings are banned". They are not. The danger is a licensing system with no protection for belief- which is worse, and true.
- Not "spoken consent is abolished". It is made optional in belief ceremonies. Optional is the scandal: a coerced bride's silence becomes legally sufficient.
- Not an attack on Muslims-a defence of Muslim mothers and children. Registration for every marriage is what Casey, the Home Office review and Muslim women's advocates all asked for.
Key facts and sources
The consultation, all four documents and the response form:
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/tying-the-knot-reforming-weddings-law-in-england-and-wales
The launch press release- the cost claims and the £6,000 venue figure:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/castles-cruises-and-coastlines-untangling-the-rules-around-tying-the-knot
The October 2025 announcement- £535 million, 12,000 jobs, £100 million for the public purse:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/major-boost-to-economy-through-wedding-law-reform
Statutory fees: the £62 register office ceremony and £114.50 registrar attendance at
https://www.gov.uk/marriages-civil-partnerships/plan-your-ceremony-
the £12.50certificate at https://www.gov.uk/order-copy-birth-death-marriage-certificate-
the £46.50 notice fee, for example:
https://www.milton-keynes.gov.uk/births-marriages-and-deaths/milton-keynes-registration-service-fees
The Marriage Foundation research behind the marriage-gap figures:
https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/MF-briefing-note-Cheaper-weddings-bridge-marriage-gap.pdf
Scottish marriage and ceremony figures:
https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/vital-events-reference-tables-2024/
The Channel 4 survey on religious-only Muslim marriages:
https://www.channel4.com/press/news/new-channel-4-survey-reveals-truth-about-muslim-marriage
The 2018 independent review into sharia law (Cm 9560):
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/applying-sharia-law-in-england-and-wales-independent-review
The Casey Review (2016):
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/575973/The_Casey_Review_Report.pdf
Forced Marriage Unit statistics 2024:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/forced-marriage-unit-statistics-2024/forced-marriage-unit-statistics-2024