Baroness Deech introduces equal marriage bill amendment to include carers
Baroness Deech introduced the amendment to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) BillBaroness Deech has introduced an amendment, which would add the provision to include cohabiting family members or carers in the bill to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill.
The amendment will be considered by peers when the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill, goes into its Report stage in the House of Lords on 8 July.
The chair of the Bar Standards Board already asserted during Committee stage that if same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, then cohabiting family members and carers should share the same rights, and tabled, before withdrawing a similar amendment.
The amendment specifically aims to extend civil partnership rights to “unpaid carers and those they care for, and family members who share a house, who have cohabited for 5 years or more and are over the age of eighteen, and the case for creating a new legal status that would confer all the benefits of civil partnerships upon those mentioned in paragraph (a) without amending the criteria for eligibility for civil partnership.”
The amendment would make the bill protect carers and family members in “cases of long-term house-sharing”.
Baroness Deech’s previous amendment was also supported by Baroness Butler-Sloss, who said earlier this year that the Government should stop “faffing around with gay marriage”, and the Bishop of Ripon.
Cure for dementia will be found in 7 years says Jeremy Hunt
BRITISH scientists will find a cure for dementia in just seven years, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has declared.
Not only will this save lives, it will also save the NHS by slashing billions of pounds a year from the cost of caring for those with the condition.
Mr Hunt said: “Finding drugs that can halt or cure dementia may seem a distant prospect now but there are drugs companies that think they will have a cure for dementia by 2020.”
He said the answer lay in DNA mapping, claiming it could unlock a “treasure trove” of information to help tackle diseases from dementia to cancer.
Plans are already under way for Britain to be the first country in the world to map the personal DNA code – known as a genome – of up to 100,000 patients.
The project would be the “medical equivalent of the invention of the internet in terms of its significance”, Mr Hunt told the annual conference of the Local Government Association in Manchester.
He added: “For the UK, this is a very big opportunity, because we are the country that first cracked what DNA was back in 1953.
