The claim
“In an area like London it would not be unreasonable to say that 20% of all our marriages are suspicious.”
Mark Rimmer, a senior Registrar in Brent and head of the Local Registration Services Association as reported on Sky News

The background
Not everyone gets married for love, but are Londoners really so cynical that 20 percent of newly-weds are doing it for a visa?

It’s a big claim from one of the officers charged with overseeing the nation’s nuptials. Mark Rimmer, a registrar in north London, made the statement yesterday on Sky News. Are 1 in 5 of the capital’s new marriages and civil partnerships shams?

The analysis
Some 31,726 marriages were registered in London in 2010 according to the ONS (the most recent year for which figures are available).

If 20 per cent were sham, we’d estimate that roughly 6,345 marriages a year are fake – that’s 12,000 people a year in the capital taking friends, random people, in some cases complete strangers, as lawfully-wedded significant others.

That’s what Mr Rimmer claims based on his own experience and that of his colleagues. Can he possibly be right?

“In an area like anywhere in London it [sham marriage] is multiple times per week … it would not be unreasonable to say that 20% of all our marriages are suspicious or have some elements of suspicion about them.

Duty to report

But registrars have a duty to report marriages they think seem suspicious to the Home Office. So if the suspicions are genuine – why aren’t they reported? When it comes to the number of marriages reported as suspicious, the figures are much lower than 20 per cent.

Nationally, there were 285,390 marriages in the UK in 2011, according to the ONS again. The figure from Sky News is that 1,800 marriages a year are reported as suspicious or sham. The Home Office would not confirm that figure, but if Sky is correct, it means that roughly 0.7 per cent of marriages are reported to be suspicious. That’s not that high.

But Mr Rimmer is talking about the London boroughs, and if you look there, the percentage of shams shoots right up.

Hackney Council told us their figures: 949 marriage or civil partnership ceremonies were held in Hackney borough in 2012, and 50 were reported to the Home Office as suspicious – that would be 5 percent.

Wandsworth Council told us that 90 marriages were marked as suspicious in 2012. They couldn’t give us total marriage figures for the year – but we know that 1,174 marriages were sanctioned there in 2010.

On the assumption that number of total marriages in the borough stayed roughly the same – that would mean that 7.6 percent were reported as suspicious in Wandsworth. We asked several other London councils for their stats but didn’t get a response.

Five per cent, and 7.6 per cent are significantly higher than the national average of 0.7 percent. But they’re not the same as 20 percent and we put that to Mr Rimmer. He said claimed that registrars are under-reporting their suspicions.

“Registrars only report those that are absolutely blatant. You don’t want to be reporting and potentially having the Home Office sending an enforcement team to disrupt a marriage that is perfectly legitimate. Therefore it is only the ones that are absolutely blatant that get reported, and those really are blatant.

“As for the rest, registrars are also very busy, therefore it is additional work to report suspicious marriages. And then registrars want to give people the benefit of the doubt. It is a subjective opinion.”

What makes a marriage suspicious

With the Home Office not providing official figures to the press, and councils patchy with a response on numbers in their boroughs, this is where the numbers stop and the anecdotal evidence comes in. Some of it quite shocking.

Mr Rimmer says that on one day this week in Brent, 2 out of 3 marriages were found to be invalid.

“Two marriages were disrupted yesterday morning in Brent. Both of which were proved to be bogus. That was two out of three on one day of the week.”

Home Office enforcement officers entered and disrupted both ceremonies, Mr Rimmer explained what happened at one.
“They asked the girl for example – ‘what’s your address?’, she said ‘oh hang on a moment’ and got a piece of paper out of her handbag to tell them the address she was supposed to be living at. There were also regular payments into her account, there were text messages between the couple saying – ‘yes I’ll do it for £5000’. We see this everyday of every working week. This is far bigger than the government recognises.”

Mr Rimmer explained what it was that made a marriage look suspicious:
“It’s about body language, it’s about what you observe, what they’re like with each other, there’s very little you can put a finger on. Unless they don’t speak the same language and they’ll tell you blatantly that they communicate through google translate. That stretches anybody’s imagination for two people getting married.”

Mr Rimmer’s case is that it’s good organisation not genuine commitment that means people pass the test: “the ones who are more intelligent, the ones who are better organised are the ones who will get away with being reported.”

Still, Mr Rimmer’s “tip of the iceberg” case is contested by several councils, even if they couldn’t provide their figures.

The press officer for Camden council told Factcheck: “in Camden if we have any inkling that is a sham marriage, we always report them. If one in five marriages really was a sham, we’d be seeing a lot more activity from the Home Office.

Southwark council said they had recently introduced passport scanners at registry offices so they can weed out fake passports, and added “it’s a registrar’s job to report their suspicions, if they’re not reporting their suspicions, they’re not doing their job.”

The verdict

Mr Rimmer stands by his claim that 20 percent of British city marriages are a sham.

Facts seem to support his point the rate of sham marriages is much higher in cities, and that the number of sham marriages is probably higher than the number reported.

But Factcheck is going to come down on the side of romance and stick to the suspicions that registrars are prepared to put their names to.

We’d estimate that the rate of sham marriages is probably slightly higher than the 5-7 per cent getting reported in London’s registry offices, but a rise of 13 per cent seems too much of a jump.

Mr Rimmer says his point may be proved when the Immigration Act 2013 comes in – that brings in tighter controls on marriage including automatically submitting all marriages involving a foreign national to the Home Office and allowing themto delay a marriage by 70 days if they want to investigate it.

If we see a big fall in marriages then, his point may proved.

By Anna Leach