Legal background Prohibiting whole life order prisoners from marrying in prison
Whole Life Orders are provided for by section 321 of the Sentencing Act 2020. This section provides that when a court passes a life sentence, it must make a minimum term order unless it is required to make a Whole Life Order. Subsection 3 sets out when a court is required to do so. Subsection 5 sets out that a Whole Life Order is an order that the early release provisions are not to apply to the offender. Therefore, such prisoners will serve the entirety of their life sentence in prison, with no possibility of release, except in exceptional circumstances on compassionate grounds.
	Schedule 22 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 sets out the transitional provisions applicable to prisoners given life sentences before the 2003 Act reformed the sentence and introduced the Whole Life Order. Such prisoners can apply to the High Court to have their sentences converted into ones under the 2003 Act framework, and the High Court cannot impose a sentence longer than the Secretary of State had previously notified them that they should serve. Therefore, the High Court can only impose a Whole Life Order on such prisoners if the Secretary of State had informed the prisoner that they did not intend that the prisoner should ever be released on licence.
	The Marriage Act 1949 gives adults in England and Wales the right to marry. Restrictions on who can get married are set out on the face of the 1949 Act. There is an exhaustive list of marriages which are to be treated as void given in the Act. The fact that one prospective spouse is a prisoner is not currently an exception to the right to marry.
	The 1949 Act was amended by the Marriage Act 1983 to enable marriage in prison following the decision of the European Commission on Human Rights in the case of Hamer v UK [1979] 12 WLUK 129. The 1983 Act enables marriages of house-bound and detained people to be solemnized at the place where they reside. Amongst other things the 1983 Act also inserted section 27A (on solemnising marriages at a person’s residence, including a prison) into the 1949 Act.
	Where a "detained person" is seeking to get married, section 27A(3) of the 1949 Act requires that the marriage notice issued by the superintendent registrar is accompanied by a statement from the "responsible authority", which is a Governor in the case of a Prison. The statement given under section 27A must identify the establishment where the person is detained and state that the responsible authority has no objection to that establishment being specified in the notice of marriage as the place where that marriage is to be solemnized.
	The extent of the power of a superintendent registrar or a prison governor to object to a prisoner’s wedding under section 27A of the 1949 Act was considered in the Court of Appeal judgment in J v B [2002] EWCA Civ 1661. The Court found that neither the registrar general nor a prison governor had powers to prevent the marriage. In respect of the governor, public policy considerations did not entitle them to adopt an interventionalist role in proceedings because section 27A(3) of the 1949 Act only allowed objections to prison marriages on practical and logistical grounds.
	Where a detained person proposes to enter a civil partnership, section 19(4) of the Civil Partnership Act 2004 (the "2004 Act") provides for an equivalent statement to be given by the responsible authority as is required by section 27A(3) of the 1949 Act.