Getting legally married when people have religious marriage isn’t compulsory. Big deal I hear you ask. But if you then become religiously unmarried you have no legal rights to alimony, splitting ownership of a home, who looks after the children, access rights to children.

An obvious example is where a marriage is annulled by a Sharia Court. I get why people might hold a court based on their religious text to decide cases only involving people of that religion where they agree to this – and communities can put a lot of pressure for people to religiously conform. But what I don’t get is where the outcome of such a case results in a burden on the state. Not splitting and deciding on how the split happens as per the laws of the UK can mean tax payers subsidise that outcome. So a call for all religious marriages having to be civilly reiterated in UK law seems a good way of resolving this issue.

What do you think?