Lockdown’s missing marriages The latest figures for marriages in England & Wales in 2021 and 2022 were released today by the Office for National Statistics. The figures show a significant rebound from the 61% fall in 2020. Britain’s lockdown policies led the biggest drop in weddings in Europe. By comparison, our neighbouring countries in Western Europe saw a drop of just one quarter. Some of those whose wedding plans were prevented in 2020 clearly carried forward those plans into 2021 and 2022. Although ONS report that marriage rates have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, there re ..read more

I’ve done a very quick review of the family policies of the five main parties, so you don’t have to. Please note that this implies nothing about any of their other policies or who Marriage Foundation favours. It’s just a snapshot observation of what they’ve said in the ‘family’ section of their manifestos, if they have one …  Click on the images to find the full manifestos. I’ve given the relevant page numbers in brackets. Gold star and clear medal goes to Reform. They are the only party to acknowledge the scale of family breakdown in the UK. They also acknowledge marriage and seek to fro ..read more

It’s now a decade since any cabinet minister made a speech that included the importance of marriage. This public silence is at odds with their private behaviour. Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer are both married, as are most of their respective cabinets. What do they know that we shouldn’t know? The case for the state’s support for marriage is a strong one. Economists argue that the primary social function of marriage is to bond men to the mothers of their future children. The psychology behind the act of marriage is compelling. Married parents and their children tend to have better social ou ..read more

(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