London. (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Britain has a marriage crisis that was only recently splashed all over the front page of The Times. The national paper of record reported findings from the Children’s Commissioner that the ‘traditional’ family is in sharp decline. There is very little traditional about the traditional family, as polls show most young people still aspire to get married. It’s a very modern ambition.
Despite this, the numbers tell a different story. Almost one family in four is headed by a lone parent and nearly half of British children now grow up outside the traditional two-parent household.
Getting wed is quickly going out of fashion, particularly where money is tight. The welfare system punishes low–income couples who live together. It’s much more profitable to live apart, costing some couples thousands in missed benefits.
As budgets across government are squeezed once again we should stop short of binning the billion pounds set aside for marriage in the Treasury through the Cameron-era Marriage Allowance. Any Chancellor tempted to take the red pen to it will become the first Chancellor in British history to remove marriage from our tax codes. An unwelcome footnote in history for any finance minister.
The small print to these plans is contained in a report published by the influential Onward think tank last year which claimed such a move should be extended to all couples, married or not. Doing away with 223 years of British tax history.
Advisors in the Truss Downing Street were busy cooking up plans to allow couples to share their £12,500 personal allowance, giving families a £2,500 boost to household finances. This was a Truss tax cut that might have been very popular, particularly among the two thirds of mums who say they would prefer to take their foot off the career pedal. A new broom at Number 10 should think twice before jettisoning these plans.
The Marriage Allowance was introduced to ‘recognise’ married couples. It has consistently failed to live up to the hype, probably because few couples will base marriage choices on the £252 on offer from the pilloried tax break. Take up rates have been under 50 per cent for years.
Marriage has continued to tank, reaching the point this year where more babies were born to unmarried couples than to married couples since records began.
This doesn’t mean we should simply junk the allowance. Politicians famously dislike finger wagging, but the judgement goes the other way. We hand out large tax breaks for couples on the breadline living apart. This is where marriage is disappearing fastest and it is little surprise. The so–called ‘marriage gap’ sees barely more than a quarter of low–income new mums getting hitched, compared to eight in 10 of better–off mums in the delivery room.
The last census showed that nearly all parents who stay together until their children reach 15 are married; the updated census will likely tell a similar story. A young Cabinet minister called Jeremy Hunt, once warned of an increasingly ‘atomised’ society unable to care for each other, advisors in a new Number 10 would do well to heed these warnings, and instead assessing how the billion–pound marriage budgetcould be better targeted to couples who need the money the most, closing bizarre ‘couple penalties’ and, at the same time,sending a clear message that getting married still matters.
Half of children in our poorest communities see their parents split up by the time they start primary school. It’s a different story in middle–class land, where moving in together makes financial sense.
To actively subsidise separation rather than couples in our welfare system is a strange way to tackle the issues raised by the Children’s Commissioner this summer. One idea put forward by Congleton MP, Fiona Bruce, is to target the payment to couples on low incomes with children under fourand make the payment automatic, using child benefit or universal credit as a carrier for this reformed allowance. This would target the allowance where it is needed most.
The early welfare reforms of Iain Duncan Smith got people into work but did little to address the couple penalty. It was left on the ‘too difficult to do’ list for another day. Earlier this year the Policy Exchange think tank ran the numbers and found that some couples stood to lose out on a quarter of their possible income if they moved in together – a figure hovering at between £1,700 to £7,500 a year. A re-booted Marriage Allowance could do a lot to deal with this, even after cuts to welfare being mooted elsewhere in government.
Frank Young works for a Westminster think tank and is writing in a personal capacity.