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Civil Partnerships in the UK

Beginning next week, gay and lesbian United Kingdom residents will have the ability to walk down the aisle. The UK has changed outdated laws and are now allowing Civil Partnerships to take place between couples, who have till now, had no rights. The government estimates that approximately 11,000-22,000 couples will apply for civil partnership between next week and 2010. However a gay market specialist agency relied upon earlier this year by Barclays Bank to measure gay lifestyle, consumer patterns, and civil partnership intentions in the UK believes that currently published official government statistics are greatly underestimated.

Based on new research, up to 274,000 couples say they intend to enter Civil Partnerships over coming years, Britain?s new form of gay civil ?marriage?. This is a figure far higher than government estimates of as few as 11,000 and a maximum of just 22,000 registrations by 2010. The current figures of between 11,000 and 22,000 registrations appear to be far too low. More than 1,000 UK couples applied for registration in the first week. To suggest that only a few thousand are expected to register each year after that seems to vastly underestimate the numbers revealed in the research.

According to Ian Johnson, a director at Out Now Consulting, a gay and lesbian specialist marketing agency, new findings from the latest research on UK gays and lesbians show that the official government estimates are unrealistic. He says that the current UK government figures are out of sync with both Out Now`s latest UK gay market research and also with newly released Whitehall figures on the total number of UK gays and lesbians. Results from the 2005 Out Now Diva and Gay Times Readers Surveys, a comprehensive lesbian and gay research study carried out in the UK, show that a much higher number of UK lesbian and gay couples intend to register their Civil Partnerships than the officially released government estimates would imply.