An examination of the explanatory material produced by the Women and Equality Unit reveals, first, a strong justification for registered partnerships to be found in the importance of social inclusion. The Final Regulatory Impact Assessment emphasises that this is one of the benefits of partnership registration, and a causal connection between law and social change is also clearly drawn. The reform of the law is linked to social attitudes around inclusion and exclusion:
The Government believes that the creation of a new legal status for same-sex couples would play an important role in increasing social acceptance of same-sex relationships, reducing homophobia and discrimination and building a safer and more inclusive society. . . Legislation will act as an important step in publicly valuing same-sex relationships… it will be much harder for people to ignore this commitment both in law and in everyday life. The Government believes that by making a public declaration of their commitment, lesbian, gay and bisexual people will feel more confident that their relationships will be respected and appreciated by society.
It is not acceptable that same-sex couples still have to struggle to have their families recognised and the creation of a civil partnership scheme will be a way through which society acknowledges and values their relationships.[118]
Moreover, social inclusion is inseparable within Third Way ideology from the economic, and specifically the idea of economic inclusion through paid employment or entrepreneurship. To be in paid work is to be part of the social, and to not be in paid employment is to have exited the social. The social and the economic become largely coterminous, and there is little value added to society if the individual is not in work (with the possible exception of full-time carers and, to a much lesser extent, stay-at-home parents).
This logic is demonstrated by the economic benefits that will allegedly flow from the Act, as explained in the Regulatory Impact Assessment:
It is hoped that businesses would see improvements in recruitment and retention from offering equal employee benefits to same-sex partners in civil partnership. Recent research by Stonewall into the attitudes of lesbian, gay and bisexual graduates found that equality of terms, conditions and benefits was one of the key factors for organisations to focus on if they were to attract high calibre lesbian, gay and bisexual employees. The Government estimates there to be between 1.5 and 2 million lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the labour force. Through the contribution to wider equality that civil partnership makes, businesses may therefore benefit by being able to draw from a wider pool of talent, and therefore attract and retain a higher calibre of staff from a range of backgrounds.[119]
Not only will social inclusion be enhanced, but we will approach something closer to an economic state of perfect efficiency, as human capital moves to where it is most highly valued. The social and the economic thus squarely meet.
Opponents of the Act in Parliament do force the government to confront the position of carers, and the citizenship value of care giving (rather than paid employment), in making the claim that the remit of the Civil Partnership Act should be extended to others. In this way, the debates usefully bring care giving and the paucity of public benefits for carers into the public, parliamentary realm. However, the government clearly rejected the vehicle of the Civil Partnership Act as a way to improve the lot of the carers more generally, falling back on the analogy between same-sex and married couples.