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Daily Mail
January 23, 2014
The state should encourage marriage and try harder to get couples to stay together while their children are young, ministers have been told.
A drive to persuade couples to marry rather than simply live together would help combat high break-up rates among cohabitees, a report said.
It also called for state spending to concentrate on families with young children, because this is the time when family relationships are under the greatest pressure and have the highest chance of breaking up.
The recommendations were prepared by the Marriage Foundation think-tank in response to a call from Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith for ideas on how to keep families together.
Mr Duncan Smith’s Family Stability Review is aimed at gathering information on how families are changing, which are most at risk of failing, and how the state can do more to keep them together.
The Marriage Foundation, which was launched by High Court family judge Sir Paul Coleridge, said in the first published evidence to the review that the families most at risk are those of unmarried new parents.
It said that cohabiting couples make up fewer than one in five parents, but half of all family breakdown.
The foundation’s report added that half of all family breakdown happens before a couple’s child reaches its second birthday.
It said that once couples reach the ten-year mark, outside factors seem to have very little influence on whether or not they stay together.
Foundation spokesman Harry Benson said: ‘There is little point in the Government attempting to improve the stability of established marriages. Approximately as many married couples who stuck it out between 1960 and 1970 are still together as those who married in 2000 and made it to 2010, despite the many social and cultural changes in that period.
Mr Duncan Smith¿s Family Stability Review is aimed at gathering information on how families are changing
‘What we need to do instead is to encourage couples considering having a family to marry and then support them through the trouble-filled early stages.
