Marital Status and Marriages

Under the 2010 Equality Act, marital status is a protected characteristic.  This means that people

‘must not be discriminated against in employment because they are married or in a civil partnership.  In the Act, marriage and civil partnership mean someone who is legally married or in a civil partnership.  Marriage can either be between a man and a woman, or between partners of the same sex. Civil partnership is between partners of the same sex.

People do not have this characteristic if they are:

• single.
• living with someone as a couple neither married nor civil partners.
• engaged to be married but not married.
• divorced or a person whose civil partnership has been dissolved.’

Equality and Human Rights Commission:  https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/advice-and-guidance/marriage-and-civil-partnership-discrimination

Status

According to the current 2011 Census: 

• More than half of Somerset adults aged 16 or older are married or in a same-sex civil partnership, but the proportion of co-habiting families has risen from 8% to 10% in the past decade.
• There were 215 households containing couples in a same-sex civil partnership, 85% of them without children in the household.

 Full data for Somerset in the 2011 Census are shown in the table below:

Marriages

According to data published in February 2018, the number of marriages taking place in Somerset decreased marginally in 2015 compared to the previous year in figures released by the Office for National Statistics. For England, there was a 3% fall in the number of marriages in the same period.

A total of 3,180 marriages occurred in Somerset in 2015 of which 3,117 were marriages of opposite sex couples and 63 were marriages of same sex couples (24 male and 39 female couples).

Marriages in Somerset 2014-15