The towns where less than a third of babies have married parents

LESS than a third of children were born into married families in parts of the country last year, figures revealed yesterday.

The chances of a baby being born to married parents fell across a series of towns and cities, mainly in northern England.

The fall in the popularity of marriage is most evident in areas hit by economic decline and high levels of social problems and benefit dependency.

However, marriage remains at the centre of family life for couples in wealthy districts in London and southern England, the figures indicate.

More than seven out of ten babies are born to married couples in some London boroughs and suburban towns.

The wealth and geographical divides were revealed by the Office for National Statistics in a detailed breakdown of birth figures for the 774,836 babies born in Britain last year. It points to a risk of deeper economic and social divisions between north and south, with overwhelming evidence suggesting children of married parents do better at school and have better health than those from unmarried families.

There were ten areas where more than 66 per cent of babies were born outside marriage in 2016, and in five of them fewer than three out of ten births were within marriage. The area with the least likelihood that new parents were married was Knowsley in Merseyside, where 73.3 per cent of births were to an unmarried mother.

The only English district not in the North where the rate was so high was Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, where well over two-thirds of newborns had unmarried mothers.

And in one area in Wales, Merthyr Tydfil, the proportion of births outside marriage was over 70 per cent. There was nowhere in Scotland and Northern Ireland where more than two-thirds of children were born to unmarried parents.

Among 15 districts where more than seven out of ten births were to married families were a series of London boroughs. In Harrow, north-west London, where children are most likely to be born to married parents, less than one in five babies – or 19.4 per cent – had unmarried mothers.

The figures brought calls for more efforts from political leaders to support marriage.

Harry Benson of the Marriage Foundation think-tank said: ‘Politicians and policy makers who think marrying makes a difference should start saying so.’

Researcher and author Patricia Morgan said: ‘Marriage is increasingly something for the middle-class.’

Evidence that married families do better has been widely distributed in Whitehall. Last year a report for the Department of Work and Pensions said that ‘evidence shows that child outcomes tend to be worse on average in lone-parent and non-married families’.