According to recent figures released by the Office for National Statistics, marriage rates in England and Wales are at their lowest since records began. Different people have their own take on what’s behind this trend, but blaming the recession by saying it must be simply because people can’t afford to get married right now is wrong. In fact, this trend is nothing new; marriage has been in steady decline since the 1980s. The most likely explanations for this decline in what was once an institution are our increasingly liberal society and the removal of the stigma associated with cohabiting and raising children without marriage and an increase in education and careers, especially among women, making us wait longer until we get married.
However, as any family law attorney will tell you, there are certain advantages to being married over living together. These advantages are mainly related to money: taxes, inheritances and the like, so they are quite important. There are a large number of couples in the UK who live together but are not married; in fact, such couples make up one sixth of all couples in the country. Unfortunately, however, not everyone realizes that they are losing out on the rights that married couples enjoy: half of them mistakenly believe that they have rights as ‘common law spouses’. Things are only going to get worse and more unfair: it is estimated that by 2030, a quarter of UK couples will be unmarried cohabitants.
The Conservative party is very publicly promoting its idea of introducing tax breaks for married couples to encourage marriage, while the left attacks this idea as “social engineering” and interference with a burgeoning social trend away from marriage. Other politicians simply call for increased protection for all vulnerable families, married or not. One thing is for sure though, in just two decades the British family and its dynamics have changed beyond recognition, in which time family law has been updated very little. So there seems to be a pretty good case for changing family law to reflect the decline in marriage.