The High Court ruled that periods of cohabitation before the commencement of the Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010 may count when deciding whether someone meets the Act’s definition of a qualified cohabitant for an estate claim.
Ms Justice Stack delivered the judgment on 22 October 2021. The issue arose before the substantive hearing of an application by C.D. under section 194, which allows a qualified cohabitant to seek provision from a deceased cohabitant’s estate, subject to a time limit.
C.D. claims to have lived with the deceased as a couple in an intimate and committed relationship for more than 30 years, ending when the deceased died in summer 2011. The Act came into force on 1 January 2011. The parties agreed that they had no children together. The respondent argued that the qualifying five-year period had to fall entirely after the Act began, which would prevent the application from proceeding.
The judge rejected that interpretation. She found that counting earlier periods of cohabitation did not give the Act retrospective effect in this case: the deceased died after the Act came into force, and the provision governed the distribution of the estate after death. The judgment distinguished taking past events into account from applying a new law retrospectively to those events.
The court also rejected the argument that section 206, which expressly addresses transitional arrangements for other forms of redress under Part 15, implicitly barred pre-commencement cohabitation from being counted in section 194 claims. Reading the Act as a whole, the judge said the definition of “qualified cohabitant” sets one standard across Part 15, and section 194’s provisions anticipate that some applicants may rely on earlier cohabitation.
The ruling was limited to that preliminary statutory question. It establishes that C.D. may rely on pre-commencement cohabitation to meet the definition and may pursue the section 194 application. It does not determine whether the claimed relationship existed, whether C.D. ultimately qualifies, or whether any provision should be made from the estate. The judgment also expressly left open whether section 194 can apply to estates where the person died before 1 January 2011.