'Divorce' rights for lovers who split up:
Couples who split up may be forced to pay compensation to each other under plans for new laws.
They will give anyone who has been in an 'intimate relationship' the opportunity to sue for money or a share of a house when the relationship ends.
The radical scheme drawn up by Government legal advisers will contain no safeguards to protect individuals from legal action by a gold-digging former partner even if their relationship was a short one.
The proposals have been prepared by the Law Commission in response to demands from ministers for a law to protect cohabiting partners who break up.
At present the country's two million cohabiting couples have few legal comebacks if they are ditched by a partner.
The law reform planners have been stalling over a cohabitation law for more than decade because of fears that it will be seen to undermine marriage and hand legal rights and duties to people who do not wish to have them.
Past proposals from the commissioners, who are senior lawyers and judges, have suggested that unmarried partners should not get a right to cash, maintenance payments or a share of the house after a breakup unless they have children, or their relationship has lasted longer than two years.
The new version of a 'marriage lite' law leaked yesterday will leave it to courts and judges to decide at what point of a relationship a couple can be said to be 'intimate and exclusive' and when one of them has made financial sacrifices to the other.
The proposals were immediately criticised yesterday. Caroline Wright, a divorce lawyer at the Boodle Hatfield firm, said: "In the past I would advised people to take out a cohabitation contract when they bought a property together. The threshold now will be lower.
"The logical extension of this thinking is that a couple could have liabilities to each other after only a brief affair. We need to know what the Law Commission-means by cohabitation."
Robert Whelan, of the Civitas think-tank said: "Once it was said that sex was the only thing you could do without the Government interfering. That isn't true any more.
"This is going to make people very nervous. People say that men these days have commitment phobia - a law like this will make men afraid of making eye contact for fear of losing half their property.