Marriage is on the rocks

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The number of couples marrying in Britain has fallen to a record low, official figures have shown.

The annual wedding count dropped by more than a tenth last year - the biggest peacetime decline since records began more than a century ago.

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The increasingly marginal importance of marriage to millions means that for the first time married people are set to become a minority. The proportion of married people among the adult population is now only a fraction over half at 50.3 per cent.

That compares with 54 per cent in 1997 and more than two thirds in the 1970s.

Last night experts blamed the fall on political indifference to marriage, which means there are no longer tax or benefits advantages to getting married.

The increasing number of working women means many are delaying marriage and having children. Sky-high property prices force couples to have a double income to afford to buy a home.

Lawyers also suggested that reluctance to marry is connected to the growing cost of divorce and the scale of settlements husbands are expected to make to ex-wives.

The spectacular drop in the count for 2005 was revealed in figures released by the Office for National Statistics yesterday.

There were 244,710 weddings in England and Wales in 2005, below the previous low of 249,227 in 2001.

It was the lowest number of weddings in a year since 1896, 109 years previously, when the population of Britain was around half the current 60million.

The drop of 10 per cent in a single year was exceeded only in 1915, during World War One, in 1921 following the post-war marriage boom, and during the Second World War.

The figures also showed that the register office wedding is on the way out.

Numbers of couples who married in "approved premises" such as stately homes overtook those marrying at register offices for the first time: 88,710 against 71,560.

The ONS put some of the blame for the falling number of marriages on a Government crackdown on sham marriages undertaken by illegal immigrants.

Rules introduced in February 2005 compel non-Europeans to marry at specialist register offices where detailed checks on their immigration and marital status can be made.

"This is one of many factors that may have contributed to the drop in the number of marriages in 2005," the ONS said.

But other commentators said the stripping out of sham marriages only exposed how low the real marriage rate has been for some time.

Robert Whelan of the Civitas think tank said: "All the people who have been saying for years that marriage makes no difference are soon going to get the opportunity to see whether they are right.

"There are strong links between marriage and economic performance, educational achievement, and alcohol and drug abuse. Academics have known this for a long time. But politicians continue to insist that marriage doesn't matter."

He added: "The idea that marriage is important for a couple has been lost. People now marry for the sake of the children - and couples who are putting the mortgage first and delaying children often see no reason to marry.

"There is no one way to put this right. But there will be problems that are very real for a large section of the population - especially people living on sink estates where very few people may be married."

Since 1997 Labour has taken the view that marriage is a private matter and that all forms of family are equally good. This view has been backed by the abolition of Married Couples' Allowance, the last tax break for husbands and wives, and policies aimed at removing references to marriage from state documentation.

However last week's UNICEF report which said British children are the worst-treated in Europe put much of the blame on the breakdown of family life, a failure closely connected to the decline of marriage.

Years of research has shown that married couples are better off and healthier than cohabiting couples.

Children of married families are likely to be healthier physically and mentally and to do better at school. They are less likely to fall into drug or drink abuse, early sex and pregnancy, unemployment or crime.

Ministers and public officials often say the figures simply mean that better educated middle class couples are more likely to marry. Their opponents say it is increasingly plain that the public commitment of marriage ties couples together and helps bind their families.

More data on marriages are available on the National Statistics website: www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Product.asp?vlnk=14275

 

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