£10k to stay away – state sponsored fatherlessness
Over the past week, a major report has found our benefits system now pays a mother almost £10,000 a year to keep her children’s father out of the home. Marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman, the gold standard for children and for society. So how do we fix this?
The Centre for Social Justice calls it the “couple penalty”. Its new report, The Stability Advantage, shows that a mother at home with a one-year-old would be £5,700 a year worse off if she marries, or even moves in with, the child’s father earning £20,000. If he earns £30,000, she loses £9,600. This is no accident. Universal Credit treats two parents under one roof as a single household, while they’re taxed as individuals – so support falls away the moment the father is present.
Strip away the jargon. This is state-sponsored fatherlessness. Week by week, the taxpayer funds an incentive for fathers to live elsewhere – and it bites hardest in the poorest homes, where a father is needed most.
The State is paying to dismantle the thing that protects children best. The same report found that parents in the poorest fifth of the population who marry are more likely to stay together than parents in the richest fifth who never do. Marriage, not money, is the stronger predictor that a child keeps both parents. Policies “neutral on marriage”, it warns, “are not neutral in effect”.
Only 47 per cent of cohabiting parents are still together by the time their child turns five, compared to 85 per cent of married parents. And family breakdown is strongly correlated with negative mental health outcomes in children. The Children’s Commissioner says more than a million children – one in ten – were referred to mental health services in a single year, almost double the number six years earlier.
All of this as Britain stops replacing itself. The birth rate is at a record low, down 22 per cent in a decade. Our nation is taxing away the families that would build its future.
And instead of promoting marriage, the Government has, as we know, opened a consultation to hand cohabiting couples many of the financial rights of marriage when they separate. Coalition for Marriage has already set out why this plan would undermine marriage.
Email your MP in your own words via www.writetothem.com, saying the fix is not to pay couples to stay together, but to stop fining them for it. Ask that instead of consulting on marriage rights for cohabitants, they scrap the couple penalty and let a working family keep more of its own wage, backing the one institution the evidence says children need.
It is essential we keep pressing the case that children thrive in the family that marriage builds, and that no government should pay parents to live apart.