The marriage stat ONS won’t print
Fewer than half of all adults in England and Wales are in a man-woman marriage. However, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which published the data last Friday, did not point that out. Instead, their headline says 51.1 per cent of adults are married or in a civil partnership. But their figure includes civil partnerships at 0.9 per cent and same-sex marriages at 0.4. Take those out and marriage as every generation before ours knew it – the lifelong union of one man and one woman – stands at 49.8 per cent – under half. And as far as I can find, nobody else has noticed.
The decline has been slow, but it is real. Ten years ago the ONS reported the married or civil partnered share was at 52.3 per cent. It is 51.1 today. The never-marrieds have grown from 32.6 to 34.9 per cent of adults, and just over one in ten of us now lives with a partner we have never married – up from 9.8 to 10.8 per cent. The ONS confirms its ten-year comparisons are statistically significant. And the share has fallen even though more people are married, not fewer – over 800,000 more in a man-woman marriage than ten years ago, right there in the ONS’s own spreadsheet. The adult population simply grew faster than that. Marriage isn’t being abandoned. It is going unchosen.
The never-married share has risen fastest in two age groups at once – the 25 to 34s, and people aged 45 to 69 – up between 4 and 7 percentage points in a decade. For a thirty-year-old, maybe we can say they not have married yet. But for a sixty-year-old, marriage hasn’t been postponed, it has been skipped.
And the Government’s answer? A consultation, closing at 11.59pm on Friday 14 August – nine days from now – that would hand marriage’s legal rewards to couples who never married. I wrote to you about it in June. Live together for three years – or less if you share a child – and a statutory money claim against your partner arrives automatically, unless you both opt out. Die without a will, and the Government is “minded” to give a surviving cohabitant the same automatic inheritance as a husband or wife. All of it, the paper has the audacity to say, “preserving the distinct and unique status of marriage”! Anyone who wants those protections can already have them today – by marrying, or by making a will. But under the Government’s proposals, whether you make the promise or not – the law would treat you the same.
Marriage matters not least because children need stability. Across ten years of UK household data, cohabiting parents were 3.4 times more likely to split up in any given year than married parents. And that gap holds true at every income level. Even the poorest married parents hold together slightly better than the richest cohabiting ones. Marriage is not a luxury for the comfortable, it’s what keeps a child’s home in one piece.
So please respond – in your own words, however short, before the deadline. Our guide to the questions that matter most is here and the response form is here. The legal industry will make its voice heard. Let’s make sure we do too.
More than 24.5 million people in England and Wales have a husband or a wife right now, and no arrangement the state has invented comes close to what that gives children. That is the case C4M exists to make. Nine days remain to tell the Government.