Better to stick together

Half of all babies born today will experience family breakdown before they have left school. The cost to the taxpayer of picking up the pieces is more than the entire defence budget.
There have been speeches, policy meetings, and a round-table discussion with agony- aunts. But just as it has been for decades under previous governments, family policy under the Coalition has defaulted to managing the consequences of breakdown.

There is no serious policy regarding its prevention.  Recently the Centre for Social Justice awarded the coalition a puny two out of ten for its policy on family breakdown. This score looks generous to me.

Family breakdown costs individuals, families, and the taxpayer. This is no surprise. When parents split up, the family income is rarely enough to pay for the extra household.

The direct effect is economic. Half of all lone parents receive tax credits, benefits and housing. The indirect effects are relational, psychological and behavioural. Family breakdown places increased demands on health, police, social services, care, and schools.

The total bill adds up to an astonishing £42 billion per year, according to the Relationship Foundation.

The sheer scale of this problem demands a serious policy. But good solutions pre-suppose a clear analysis of the problem which has been shamefully lacking.
In the 1960s and 70s, family breakdown doubled from half-a-million lone parents to one million, driven by a sixfold rise in divorce rates.

Since 1980, however, divorce rates have fluctuated within a narrow band, even dropping a little in recent years. Yet family breakdown has doubled again: there are two million lone parents today.
The problem is not divorce; all of the increase since 1980 has come from the growing number of unmarried families.

In 1980, 12 per cent of babies were born outside marriage. Now, the figure is 45 per cent. My research, using Millennium Cohort Study data on 15,000 mothers with five-year olds, shows that unmarried parents are consistently more likely to split up than married parents, regardless of education or income.

The explanation for rising family breakdown is simple. More unmarried parents means more family breakdown.
The conventional view is that this is simplistic. Marriage is really a matter of selection. It is not marriage or cohabitation that matters but the kind of people who marry or not.

For example, Institute for Fiscal Studies researchers used the same Millennium data to show that the remaining differences between married and unmarried couples could be explained by including the factors of ‘relationship quality’ and especially ‘planned birth’. According to these researchers, marriage per se adds little.

But this argument is inadequate at best and flawed at worst. Family stability should have improved since 1980 as the age, education and income of new parents have all increased over time. Instead it has got steadily worse.
And few British researchers seem aware of, let alone cite, the compelling research on commitment that is moving forward apace in the US.

The decision to have a baby and the decision to get married reflect the same key characteristic of commitment known as dedication. Marriage obviously has no effect if you remove its key ingredient.

So unless we really believe that British couples have somehow become inherently incapable of holding down a relationship for a few years, the only factor that can plausibly account for increased family breakdown in the last 30 years is the trend away from marriage.

Having just celebrated 25 years of married life myself, I know — and my wife will readily confirm — that marriage is no magic bullet. Living together with children for a long period of time is full of ups and downs. Marriage can be hard. Divorce rates are high, even if unchanged for years.

But getting married makes it far more likely that a couple will stay together for life. Remarkably few couples stay together for very long outside of marriage.

Look at longer-term stability. By a child’s 16th birthday, just three per cent of intact parents are not married. The rest have either split up or got married.
Yes, you read that three per cent figure right.

Let me say  it another way: 97 per cent of intact parents with 16-year-olds are married. This is 2001 Census data so it is extremely robust. (I expect the 97 per cent figure to be a little lower in the 2011 Census because of the big increase in unmarried births during the 1980s and 90s.

The story however remains the same.) Despite wishful thinking otherwise, ‘long-term stable relationship’ therefore really means ‘married relationship’. Even today, two-thirds of first-time newlyweds will stay married for life. Outside of marriage, long-term stability is rare.

Now look at the costs. Amongst parents with children under five, married parents account for 54 per cent of births yet only 20 per cent of splits and 14 per cent of the costs of the first five years of family breakdown.

If the entire cost to the taxpayer of family breakdown — benefits, tax credits, health, etc — during those five years were divided according to marital status at birth, £1 out of £7 is spent on married parents who divorce, £4 out of £7 are spent on unmarried dual registered parents who separate, and £2 out of £7 are spent on sole registered parents.

If we want to see fewer break-ups, less heartache, and lower costs, we have to back marriage.

Yet there is a peculiar blind-spot at the heart of policy-making when it comes to marriage, cohabitation and lone parenthood. At a recent policy meeting at 10 Downing Street, I was shocked at how much information appeared to be unknown to policy-makers on this subject.

Some evidence appears to be wilfully discarded. The recent Frank Field review of poverty and Graham Allen review of early intervention are very good illustrations of this. Inexplicably, neither review mentions the subject of family structure at all.

Search for yourself. It is an extraordinary omission when lone-parenthood is so clearly associated with the risk of poverty and therefore the potential for early intervention. Both reviews ignored the evidence submitted to them on this.

We need to open our eyes to the evidence. Family breakdown is not inevitable. But the number of lone-parent families will continue to rise until we, as a society, face up to the reality that the way we structure our families matters as much as the quality of our relationships.
Government can play a key role here.

Here is my seven-point plan for a serious and effective preventive policy that might have a decent chance of stemming the rising tide of family breakdown and reversing the trend back towards 1980 levels.

1. Identify the problem. How does family breakdown affect government? What is the scale of the problem? What are its key drivers? This is a task for an independent review. Family breakdown needs to be mapped. The Office for National Statistics is the obvious candidate as a well-regarded agency that has an outstanding record of going where the evidence takes it.

2. Place responsibility for family policy within the Department for Work and Pensions. At present, there is a Families Minister within the Department of Education. However the policy brief is inevitably focused on the urgency of picking up the pieces of family breakdown rather than preventing it in the first place.

The Department for Work and Pensions pays by far the biggest share of the bill for family breakdown, amounting to some 40 per cent of the £42bn spent by the government each year. They therefore have the biggest incentive to reduce the problem. This is where responsibility for preventive policy should lie.

3. Identify possible solutions. Family breakdown has risen relentlessly for the last 50 years. Whatever it is that government is doing, and whatever its advisors are advising, isn’t working. The key qualification for a second independent review is experience in the research field of what makes relationships work. Because this is so limited in the UK, there is a strong case for importing US expertise here.

4. Appoint an independent family champion to sell preventive policy to government ministers. It is well-known that the whole subject of family carries tremendous political risk, as ‘back to basics’ showed. Few politicians or policy makers will stick their heads above the parapet.

A champion is needed who can provide ministers and government officials with a compelling narrative, robust evidence and support for the difficult subject of family.

5. Implement a national policy on family structure. Should an independent review confirm my analysis that family structure matters, then government should implement a long-term plan. As well as a positive policy of encouraging or incentivising marriage, there is also a case for a negative policy of discouraging and disincentivising cohabitation.

This is not as outlandish as it may sound. What people think and what research says about the merits of cohabitation are sharply at odds today in much the same way as they were on the merits of smoking in the 1970s. Policy that is underpinned by good research can change the tide of public opinion and behaviour.

6. Implement a national policy on relationship education. The best studies of the best relationship-education programmes clearly show that they can help strengthen couples, reduce conflict and increase stability significantly. Current programmes in the UK are small-scale but are accessing groups as diverse as newlyweds, unmarried parents, military families and prison couples.

There are some really good aspects of the new £7.5m UK relationship programme being funded by the Department of Education. But the level of funding is hopelessly inadequate for dealing with a problem 5,000 times its size.  Most of it remains treatment-oriented rather than prevention-oriented. A national programme of relationship education needs to be implemented at key access points and with appropriate scale. Even a huge £200m programme would still only represent a preventive investment of half a per cent.

7. Evaluate demonstration programmes with gold-standard research. Although there is plenty of evidence that relationship education can be highly effective in a range of settings, none of these studies have been conducted in the UK.  Demonstration programmes need to be evaluated to a gold standard in order to provide evidence of effectiveness and freedom from political controversy. Once the principle is demonstrated, a more relaxed approach can be taken to promising new programmes and initiatives.

Family breakdown is going to affect half of all children born today unless we do something radically different.
That means unashamedly backing marriage. For married couples, staying together for life is the norm. For unmarried couples, it remains the exception. It also means backing relationship education. Well-implemented programmes strengthen relationships and reduce family breakdown. Government and policy makers can no longer continue to ignore the problem and assume that family breakdown is inevitable. They must pay attention to evidence that offers real hope.

So where, Messrs Cameron and Clegg, is your family policy?

Harry Benson is the author of Let’s Stick Together: the relationship book for new parents. He is director of Bristol Community Family Trust. He has run more than 500 courses for 6,000 people during the last decade and edited the only, to date, major UK academic book on the subject ‘What works in relationship education’.