GOVERNMENT OFFERS £500 TO SPLIT OR £252 A YEAR TO STAY MARRIED!

Last Friday, a Government announcement boasted of a “non-means tested £500 mediation voucher” for separating families – paid up front, no income test, no questions asked. The State already spends over £7 million a year on this scheme. It spends nothing on an equivalent grant to help couples marry or strengthen their marriage. The Marriage Allowance reduces a married couple’s tax bill by at best £252 a year – and only if both partners’ incomes fall within set limits.

Why is the Government offering £500 to help you split up, but only £252 a year if you stay together?

Beyond the £500 voucher, family legal aid for divorce and separation proceedings costs the taxpayer millions of pounds every year. And family breakdown costs the British taxpayer an estimated £51 billion a year. The Government continues to invest in the dissolution, not the promotion of marriage. This spring, it opens its cohabitation consultation, expected to extend marriage-style legal rights to relationships that never made the commitment.

The media plays along. The Independent has just run its third ‘walkaway wives’ piece in recent months. It follows an earlier piece this month and another in January. All three were built on the same report – co-written by two journalists and commissioned by a divorce law firm, a wealth manager and a women’s midlife media platform. The report’s single substantive recommendation – a “wraparound divorce team” of lawyers, financial advisers and coaches – is the integrated service the three commissioning parties themselves sell. Independent?

The news outlet, like the Government, conveniently leaves out the facts that do not fit the story. In the same survey, 25 per cent of divorced midlife women report being financially worse off; 21 per cent would do things differently with hindsight; only 19 per cent think their divorce was amicable.

And neither considers the children. The Exeter Family Study found long ago that the poorest outcomes for children are associated not with conflict but with the re-ordering of the family itself. More recent UK longitudinal research on three British birth cohorts confirms the harm has not diminished as divorce has been normalised. James Grigg, head of family law at HCR Law, observed in April 2025 that no-fault has not removed blame or acrimony, only displaced it into financial proceedings.

Ending a marriage is supposed to be hard. That is what carries it through the years when feelings fade, and that is what protects the children of it. Our laws should make it easier to stay together, not harder.

I deliver marriage enrichment courses around the country and internationally – and I see transformational outcomes for most couples including long-struggling relationships. It can be done. If your church, fellowship group or community would welcome that work, please get in touch.

C4M was founded to champion marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, the gold standard for families and society. The State has spent fifty years making it easier to leave. It is about time we made it easier to stay.