(I wrote this five years ago but it’s every bit as relevant today, Harry) I know. Maybe your marriage is a mess. It’s drifting, it’s become functional, it’s lost the love and it’s not what you dreamed. In short it needs a kick up the backside. Maybe you’ve even finally decided it’s over. At last you’ve summoned up the courage to call it a day. But before you give up that last flake of hope, or book that appointment with a lawyer, please humour me for a couple of minutes. I’ve stood on the brink of divorce myself. In our case, I was on the receiving end. My wife Kate had tried to tell me for ye ..read more

Last week I had the great honour of presenting at the Budapest Democratic Summit. The conference was a celebration of Hungary’s ‘family friendly’ policies that have seen their fertility rate rise from the lowest in Europe to above the EU average over eleven years and to see their marriage rate nearly double. The conference was headlined by Hungary’s President and former families minister Katalin Novak with talks from prime minister Viktor Orban, Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni, the presidents of Bulgaria and Serbia, a dozen or so families ministers from around the world, and 60 other sp ..read more

Today marks the launch of the Church of England’s report on Families and Households. You can download and read the report for yourself here. We contributed extensively to the commission and one of our contributions actually makes a highlighted appearance on page 44, without a namecheck. The relevant section is pages 31-58. Alas the title ‘Celebrating diversity in family life’ says it all. One of the key recommendations is that ‘It is critical to recognise and value all kinds of loving couple relationships’. This is something of a departure from the traditional Christian message that we should ..read more

New figures from the Ministry of Justice show that divorce applications in the second quarter of this year reached the highest levels in a decade. Applications reached 33,566 between April and June, up 22% on the previous year. The obvious headline is that divorce rates are now skyrocketing following the introduction of ‘no fault’ divorce laws for England & Wales on 6th April. But hang on! Quarterly figures do indeed show a rise … after the lowest figures in the final quarter of last year. Here’s the chart to show it: When you annualise the numbers and show what’s happened in the past yea ..read more

Law changes have produced an expected blip in divorce at worst. Ministry of Justice family court statistics up to the end of December 2022 came out today. I note that their ability to publish data three months on stands in stark contrast to ONS who still haven’t published marriage statistics for 2020, which ended a mere 27 months ago. Well done MoJ. Come on ONS. What’s very clear from these new stats is that there hasn’t been a huge boom in divorce case starts following the move to ‘no fault’ divorce for all last April. Yes, there’s been a blip upwards. But it follows a blip downwards at the e ..read more

This week the chancellor announced that from 2025 parents will be offered free childcare for their children as young as 9 months old. Whereas parents will now be able to send their tiny children to be looked after by strangers outside of the family, there is no equivalent provision to support those who prefer to care for their toddlers at home or with grandparents. Some mothers – and let’s face it this is about mothers – will undoubtedly relish the opportunity to return to work. Parenting small children can be a mind-numbingly thankless task. As a father of six children, now all young adults ..read more

New births data for 2021 from the Office for National Statistics showed a sharp fall in births within marriage to below 50% for the first time. Here’s our response:   Harry Benson, research director of Marriage Foundation, commented: “Births outside of marriage have been hovering just below 50 per cent for the past decade. A sharp increase above 50 per cent in 2021 is almost certainly a knock-on effect of the ban and restrictions on marriage during lockdown in the previous year. These new data show that the share of births within marriage have fallen between 5% and 8% across all soci ..read more

The Mail and Times are both reporting the latest Office for National Statistics figures on divorces in England & Wales for 2021, up 9.6% on 2020. My first thoughts about this are that this is an anomaly, as I said in my quote in the print version of the Mail. The ONS statistician warns about this in their release: “It is important to remember that divorces in both 2020 and 2021 may have been affected by disruption to family court activities because of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on divorce applications”. We have seen little to no early indication of a big rise in 2021 divorces ..read more

In response to a report from the Women and Equalities Committee on rights for cohabiting couples – to which we submitted evidence last year – the government has largely rejected their proposals. Two of the six proposals were ‘partially accepted’: the first relating to awareness of the legal distinctions between marriage, civil partnership and cohabitation; the second to awareness within religious communities of the consequences of non-legally binding wedding and a legal marriage. Three proposals were rejected outright: proposal for an ‘opt-out’ scheme that gives cohabiting couples automatic ri ..read more

This article was first published in August by Conservative Woman During the lockdown restrictions of 2020, marriage rates fell in every country in Europe except one: Hungary. My new report from Marriage Foundation shows that while 23% fewer couples got married in Western European countries such as France, Germany and the Netherlands, the drop was an astonishing 42% in the Mediterranean countries of Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. In Hungary, marriage rates rose 3% to the highest levels in Europe. The UK has yet to publish data on 2020 weddings. But with the draconian restrictions all but ba ..read more