The recent report on welfare produced by the former Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, argues that we are living in a "broken society," caused for the most part by the undermining of marriage. The notion of the broken society has been promoted vigorously by David Cameron and looks likely to be one of the main features of the Tory campaign at the next election. The Conservative argument is that the economy might have done quite well under New Labour, but social policy has failed; we live in a society marked, according to Cameron, by "social breakdown, family breakdown." The idea is that Britain once had a broken economy, fixed by Thatcher. The task for Cameron's Conservatives is to do the same for the broken society.
Marriage good, cohabitation bad is a prime theme of IDS's report. The risk of a couple with one or more children separating, it is claimed, is more than five times greater for cohabiting couples than for married ones. Marriage hence appears as a key protection against family instability. "Family breakdown trends," the report says, "are being driven entirely by the increase in unstable cohabiting relationships." It is a startling assertion.
But it is not true. The figure of five times greater breakdown for cohabiting couples includes under "cohabitation" both couples living together and those who are "closely involved" but not in the same household. The figure for break-ups for the first group is 3.5 times the rate for married couples; the figure for the second is 13.3 times as high. Those who have a child but do not live together, in other words, make up a high proportion of "cohabiting" parents whose relationship breaks up—an unsurprising finding.
The claims in the Tory report are based on two sources—the Millennium Cohort study, which is following the experience of a large group of children born in 2000 and their families; and a piece of research by LSE's Kathleen Kiernan. The millennium research quoted in IDS's report only covers the first three years of a child's life. This is far too short a period from which to make sweeping inferences about family stability; divorce rates on average rise across the first ten years of marriage. Kiernan's work is based on only a small sample of households, and she stresses that hard conclusions can't be drawn from it. Moreover, it is impossible to establish whether the greater stability that marriage is held to provide comes from the institution itself or the fact that those who get married are more committed to one another anyway.
Cohabitation is on the rise in all developed countries, while marriage is in decline—although there is considerable variation between countries. Cohabitation, especially among those under 30, is longer established and more universal in Scandinavia, France and the Netherlands than elsewhere. Britain, along with countries such as Germany, Belgium and Austria, belongs to a group with intermediate levels of cohabitation. Nations where cohabitation is rare are mostly southern European, such as Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy.
In southern European countries, for most men and women, marriage still signals the beginning of the first partnership, where "partnership" means a couple living in the same household. In other European countries, on the other hand, the first union is one of cohabitation. There is also a correlation between propensity to cohabitation and level of affluence; the poorest countries are those where marriage and the family have changed least. Can we expect the less well-developed countries to move in the same direction as the richer ones?
The question is not straightforward. Different countries have varying welfare systems. Yet evidence clearly suggests that the more developed a country becomes—not just economically, but especially in relation to the independence of women—the greater the shift towards new-style marriage and family relationships. Take Spain, a country that has done well economically over the past ten years. Over this period, women have entered the labour force in larger numbers, and surveys show marked changes in people's attitudes towards cohabitation, especially among the younger generation. Well over 80 per cent of those aged under 40 think that there is nothing wrong with cohabitation.
Cohabitation, then, is increasingly likely to become a prior stage before marriage, and to a lesser degree an alternative to it. The precipitating factors to marriage are likely to be either the decision to have a child or the actual existence of a child or children. In Sweden, 55 per cent of children are born outside of marriage. The birth of a child is not an immediate stimulus to marriage. About half of those with a child get married within two years of the birth, although the rate climbs over time, especially if more children arrive. The overall conversion rate to marriage in Sweden is one in three within five years of the start of the partnership. The average across Europe is one in two.
The Scandinavian experience shows how careful we have to be in drawing conclusions about the relationship between changing family patterns and social stability. Scandinavian countries have diverged most from traditional family forms. Yet no serious analyst would suggest that they are in the throes of social breakdown. They have their problems, as do all countries, but they have negotiated a period of rapid change better than most.
In Britain, as in the US, most cohabiting parents are poor, and this fact makes it hard to isolate the effect of marriage on the durability or fragility of relationships. Marriage is a public sign of commitment and, other things being equal, may have value in holding a couple together who would otherwise break up. The trouble is that other things very rarely are equal.
Iain Duncan Smith proposes tax incentives for couples who marry, and this could become official Tory policy. Yet a tax break is likely to influence only a few couples at the margins—the vast majority of those who get married would have done so anyway. Significant sums of money will be spent to little effect.
The Scandinavian countries have lower rates of poverty than Britain or the US, and it is this factor above all that explains why cohabitation, and lone-parent families, are so much more problematic in the latter two cases. A recent survey by the Brookings Institution in the US concludes that marriage promotion will not work among poorer groups until more fundamental problems are tackled. A key one is teenage pregnancy, which in both countries accounts for almost half of all children born to unmarried mothers. Marriage is simply not a solution here. Divorce rates among those who marry young are very high. The emphasis should be upon preventing early pregnancy rather then promoting marriage.
The Fragile Families study at Princeton and Columbia universities has looked at the experience of 5,000 unmarried parents in the US. Two thirds, both men and women, "agree" or "strongly agree" with the statement that "it is better for children if their parents are married." Ninety per cent of mothers rate "husband having a steady job" and "emotional maturity" as key qualities for a successful marriage. However, these traits are in short supply.
What does all this mean for marriage and family policy? First, we should avoid doom and gloom analyses. We are not living in a broken society, but one struggling to adapt to large-scale change. The remedy cannot be to look back to the past, especially a mythical one. As Stephanie Coontz has shown in her book The Way We Never Were, there never was a golden age of the family. The average 1950s father spent less time with his children than does the average modern father. The family in earlier times had its virtues, but it was based upon values and practices that are incompatible with the society we now live in. It was patriarchal—based on the dominance of men over women, sanctified in law; founded upon a division of labour (men as the breadwinners and women confined to the home) that no longer exists; and built upon a double standard of sexuality, in which men enjoyed sexual freedoms largely denied to women. Children had few rights, whereas now their rights are embedded in national as well as international law.
Marriage and the family in current times reflect—or should reflect—the democratic principles central to wider society. Partners should have equal rights and obligations. Women are in the labour market to stay. The family can only remain strong if these changes are recognised. In truth, there is still a considerable way to go. A recent study looked at the transition from cohabitation to marriage in 28 countries. It found that couples who cohabit are likely to split domestic chores fairly evenly. Following marriage, however, the proportion done by men dipped, with women on average doing well over twice as many hours as men, despite holding paid jobs. Countries with the highest cohabitation rates—the Scandinavian countries—are those where housework is spread most evenly.
Tax breaks to encourage marriage work least well with those who, on the face of it, need them most—the poorest groups in society. As far as possible, taxation should not create disincentives to marry, but the balancing act is difficult. Many people beside cohabiters are defined as "not married," including lone parents, the divorced and widowed. Many people in these categories may want to be married. The "normalising" of those who are not married is an important step forward for a liberal society. In the past, many who found themselves in such circumstances were ostracised.
In societies where the average age of marriage has reached a historical high, cohabitation can be an important place of learning for future relationships. More and more it will happen before marriage as well as exist outside of it. The right policy is not to accentuate the distinctive nature of marriage, but on the contrary to upgrade the status of cohabitation. So far, in Britain at least, most attention has been given to the financial implications of cohabitation. A recent Law Commission report says that where an unmarried couple had a child together, or had lived together for a specified number of years, compensation could be paid by one partner to the other on separation.
Finally, instead of promoting marriage in general those worried about family breakdown should focus on the group facing most difficulty in today's post-industrial society: poorly qualified men, sometimes from immigrant communities but now at least as often from the indigenous population. Unskilled manual work is less and less common. Most unskilled jobs are in the service sector. Men who lack formal job skills may also not have the "soft skills" that women have; or they may refuse to do what they see as '"women's jobs." The evidence suggests that many women do not regard them as marriage prospects, even when they might have been intimately involved with them. Hitherto, policies to promote gender equality have all been about improving the position and prospects of women. These must now be joined by parallel policies directed at the men who are losing out—and the social circles where economic deprivation is closely related to family and relationship failure.
