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16,000 gay couples wed in first year of new law
Martin Bentham, Home Affairs Editor11 Oct 2007
More than 16,000 gay weddings took place in Britain last year, with a quarter of them held in London.
A National Statistics study shows that in the first full year since civil partnerships were introduced, 16,106 same-sex marriages were registered.
London was the area with the highest number of ceremonies, about 4,000, followed by the South-East, which accounted for about 2,700.
Today's report also reveals that 10 per cent of the men and almost a quarter of the women involved in a gay wedding were previously married-The average age for males registering a same-sex partnership was 47 and for females nearly 44.
The average age gap between partners was eight years for men and six years for women.
The figures paint indicate the Government's introduction of civil partnerships in December 2005 was a popular move.
Nearly 2,000 gay weddings took place in the first month after the new law came in and more than 4,000 partnerships were registered in the each of the first three quarters of last year.
About 60 per cent of the ceremonies across Britain involved men, but in London the proportion was 70 per cent.
The report says the capital accounted for 32 per cent of all gay male weddings in Britain, despite having only 13 per cent of the national male population.
London accounted for 15 per cent of the 6,458 lesbian weddings that took place across the UK last year and the South-East accounted for 17 per cent of the national total. England accounted for 90 per cent of the total of partnerships, followed by Scotland with six per cent, Wales (three per cent) and Northern Ireland (one per cent).
The total number of male same-sex partnerships was 9,648.
The average age of men entering a partnershipwas 47, down from 53 during December 2005, while for women it was 43.6, compared with 46.1 for the first month of the new law.
In six cases, those getting married had been in a previous civil partnership registered abroad.
There have been no gay "divorces" - formally known as a partnership dissolution - since the new law came in, although this is largely explained by the fact that a couple must have been married for a year before this can be legally approved.
Today's report says that last year's rate of involvement in civil partnerships was 1.8 men per 1,000 unmarried male residents aged 16 or over, compared with a rate of one per 1,000 among women.
The number of partnerships of either sex registered during the year dropped slightly in the final quarter.
This might reflect a fall-off in the rate of marriages after an initial burst following the introduction of civil partnerships, but it could also mirror the traditional drop in the volume of heterosexual marriages caused by the poorer weather late in the year.
