Neil O’Brien is the Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal and Development
Successive governments have set themselves up to champion equal opportunity of success for children – whether it’s levelling the playing field across household incomes, or tackling disadvantages attached to race or sex. But few governments have sought to tackle one of the most meaningful determinants of a child’s wellbeing: family stability.
Marriage has been retreating from British family life for decades. The figures are stark. The number of marriages in England and Wales has fallen dramatically over the past half-century: from around 400,000 in 1973 to just 224,402 in 2023, despite the population growing by more than ten million.
Among young people the decline is even more pronounced. The Centre for Social Justice has found that just 2 per cent of men are married by 25 today, compared with 62 per cent half a century ago.
The death of “I Dos” has a troubling impact on the next generation. Children of married parents are far less likely to face family breakdown than those with cohabiting parents, even despite other circumstances.
The CSJ’s new Stability Advantage report finds that, over the first fourteen years of parenthood, married parents in the poorest fifth of households are less likely to separate than unmarried parents in the richest fifth, even after controlling for a range of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics.
The consequences are particularly important for children. Among teenagers whose natural parents were still together, 84 per cent have married parents. Children with married parents do better when it comes to educational attainment, health outcomes, behaviour, and likelihood of achieving family stability themselves as an adult.
Of course, not every marriage is happy and stable – and we don’t have a magic wand to make them so.
But Governments routinely act on evidence that one institution or behaviour produces better outcomes on average. If one family structure is substantially more likely to remain intact while children grow up, it is reasonable to ask whether policy should recognise that fact rather than pretending that all relationship structures have identical consequences.
That question brings us to the Government’s ‘A Fairer End to Relationships’ consultation.
The proposal would create a new legal framework for cohabiting couples who have lived together for three years or more. Depending on the circumstances, separation could lead to financial orders affecting property and finances, while proposed inheritance reforms could give surviving cohabitants rights where a partner dies without a valid will. The framework would operate automatically unless couples opted out.
What signal does this automated “marriage-lite” policy send before relationships even begin?
Marriage is unusual precisely because it involves a deliberate public commitment. People know that by choosing to marry, they are accepting a defined set of responsibilities towards one another. People like Harry Benson who study family breakdown stress the crucial importance of ‘deciding‘, rather than just ‘sliding‘.
The Government’s proposal risks creating a different kind of legal relationship in which substantial obligations can arise without the same explicit act of consent. In fact, polling from survation shows that nearly three-quarters of people (72 per cent) have minimal or no awareness of these planned updates at all.
The proposals seem to have united critics from a variety of perspectives. On the one hand, liberals are alarmed that people might find themselves bounced into a contract they never signed. As Lois McLatchie Miller has pointed out – Taylor Swift could have faced a multi-million-pound cost order from her ex Joe Alwyn without ever having agreed to it.
Conservatives might also worry at the impact on relationships: A new study on how similar proposals played out in Finland show that “marriage-lite”, far from encouraging responsible commitment, drove down the marriage and birth rate even further. Cohabiting couples, in the meantime, did not increase their likelihood if stability, and remained more likely to split than married couples.
The evidence should prompt a more serious debate about what government can do to support stable families: as I have argued before – the UK tax and benefits system penalises families and children in a way that no similar developed country does. We also need to look at how young people can honest information about the consequences of different relationship choices, and whether reforms intended to protect people at the end of relationships inadvertently weaken incentives for commitment at the beginning.
For a country worried about child poverty, social mobility, loneliness, declining fertility and the cost of welfare, turning a blind eye to the marriage problem is no longer an option – and sleepwalking into the massive changes Labour are planning just won’t do.
Neil O’Brien is the Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal and Development
Successive governments have set themselves up to champion equal opportunity of success for children – whether it’s levelling the playing field across household incomes, or tackling disadvantages attached to race or sex. But few governments have sought to tackle one of the most meaningful determinants of a child’s wellbeing: family stability.
Marriage has been retreating from British family life for decades. The figures are stark. The number of marriages in England and Wales has fallen dramatically over the past half-century: from around 400,000 in 1973 to just 224,402 in 2023, despite the population growing by more than ten million.
Among young people the decline is even more pronounced. The Centre for Social Justice has found that just 2 per cent of men are married by 25 today, compared with 62 per cent half a century ago.
The death of “I Dos” has a troubling impact on the next generation. Children of married parents are far less likely to face family breakdown than those with cohabiting parents, even despite other circumstances.
The CSJ’s new Stability Advantage report finds that, over the first fourteen years of parenthood, married parents in the poorest fifth of households are less likely to separate than unmarried parents in the richest fifth, even after controlling for a range of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics.
The consequences are particularly important for children. Among teenagers whose natural parents were still together, 84 per cent have married parents. Children with married parents do better when it comes to educational attainment, health outcomes, behaviour, and likelihood of achieving family stability themselves as an adult.
Of course, not every marriage is happy and stable – and we don’t have a magic wand to make them so.
But Governments routinely act on evidence that one institution or behaviour produces better outcomes on average. If one family structure is substantially more likely to remain intact while children grow up, it is reasonable to ask whether policy should recognise that fact rather than pretending that all relationship structures have identical consequences.
That question brings us to the Government’s ‘A Fairer End to Relationships’ consultation.
The proposal would create a new legal framework for cohabiting couples who have lived together for three years or more. Depending on the circumstances, separation could lead to financial orders affecting property and finances, while proposed inheritance reforms could give surviving cohabitants rights where a partner dies without a valid will. The framework would operate automatically unless couples opted out.
What signal does this automated “marriage-lite” policy send before relationships even begin?
Marriage is unusual precisely because it involves a deliberate public commitment. People know that by choosing to marry, they are accepting a defined set of responsibilities towards one another. People like Harry Benson who study family breakdown stress the crucial importance of ‘deciding‘, rather than just ‘sliding‘.
The Government’s proposal risks creating a different kind of legal relationship in which substantial obligations can arise without the same explicit act of consent. In fact, polling from survation shows that nearly three-quarters of people (72 per cent) have minimal or no awareness of these planned updates at all.
The proposals seem to have united critics from a variety of perspectives. On the one hand, liberals are alarmed that people might find themselves bounced into a contract they never signed. As Lois McLatchie Miller has pointed out – Taylor Swift could have faced a multi-million-pound cost order from her ex Joe Alwyn without ever having agreed to it.
Conservatives might also worry at the impact on relationships: A new study on how similar proposals played out in Finland show that “marriage-lite”, far from encouraging responsible commitment, drove down the marriage and birth rate even further. Cohabiting couples, in the meantime, did not increase their likelihood if stability, and remained more likely to split than married couples.
The evidence should prompt a more serious debate about what government can do to support stable families: as I have argued before – the UK tax and benefits system penalises families and children in a way that no similar developed country does. We also need to look at how young people can honest information about the consequences of different relationship choices, and whether reforms intended to protect people at the end of relationships inadvertently weaken incentives for commitment at the beginning.
For a country worried about child poverty, social mobility, loneliness, declining fertility and the cost of welfare, turning a blind eye to the marriage problem is no longer an option – and sleepwalking into the massive changes Labour are planning just won’t do.