Civil partnerships less equal to marriage than previously thought

I missed what was apparently the highlight of Conference yesterday. Not Nick Clegg's speech (which was IMO good, if perhaps understandably serious and businesslike), but Ben Summerskill of Stonewall's assertion, at the DELGA fringe meeting, that marriage equality for same- and different-sex marriages would cost £5 billion to implement, and therefore we shouldn't do it. (I wasn't at the fringe, so this isn't an eye-witness report, but apart from the Pink News article I had a long chat with a friend who had come directly from the fringe and told me exactly the same thing.)

His reasons - that heterosexual couples might take up civil partnerships for increased pension payments and that same-sex platonic friends might get marries for tax breaks - are worthy of The Daily Mail. But let's just for a moment assume, for the sake of argument, that he's right. Let's assume that giving marriages and civil partnerships equal footing would cost £5 billion. Suddenly civil partnerships and marriages don't sound so equal any more, do they?

Edit: it strikes me that, as his examples involved different-sex couples supposedly gaining extra benefits under civil partnerships, he might have been trying to make a point to privileged people about how discrimination looks. If so, I think he was making it badly and, actually, I don't really believe he was being that subtle.

Edit 2: it occurs to me that the figure I heard last night was £5 million - I don't think it makes a difference to my basic point, but it's possible that Pink News's report has the wrong figure (but equally likely that the figure I heard last night was wrong).

Out of interest, the text of DELGA's motion (which both sashajwolf and I will be supporting today) is under the cut:

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