The UK now has Europe’s fastest falling divorce rate

PLUNGING divorce rates mean that British couples are on the way to enjoying the most stable marriages in Europe.

Researchers found that nearly a third of UK couples who married in 1992 had divorced within 15 years.

But the divorce rate in this first decade and a half is now expected to drop below a quarter – marking the fastest fall in Europe.

It contrasts with a rising likelihood that marriages will fail in countries including Sweden, France, Italy, Spain and Belgium.

British divorce rates are on course to undercut those in Germany, which have dropped by an estimated five percentage points over the past quarter century, and in Switzerland, which have fallen by six points in that time.

Harry Benson, research chief of the Marriage Foundation which carried out the study, said: ‘Our analysis provides the most accurate picture of European divorce rates ever seen.

‘We have long claimed that lower divorce rates in the UK are due to the relaxation of social pressure to marry. The result is that those who do marry are more committed and hence more likely to stay together.

‘We are just beginning to see this trend ripple across Europe in the earliest years of marriage. But over the first 15 years of marriage, Britain clearly leads Europe.’ The picture of divorce rates over the first 15 years of marriage – the period in which a couple fated to divorce are overwhelmingly likely to have parted – was drawn from informarate tion about 20 European countries collected by the EU’s statistics arm Eurostat.

It showed that the 15-year divorce of British couples marrying in 1992 was 30.7 per cent. For 2002 weddings it had fallen to 28.1 per cent, and projections say the rate for 2017 weddings is likely to be 23 per cent.

According to official figures, the number of divorces in England and Wales fell below 100,000 a year in 2018 for the first time in nearly 50 years. While fewer couples are marrying than in the past, overall divorce rates, which show the likelihood that a mar

‘More likely to stay together’

riage will collapse, are also at their lowest level since 1971.

Divorce boomed in the early 1970s following liberalisation of divorce laws.

Critics of easy divorce believe that rates are likely to climb again if Boris Johnson’s government goes ahead with its promise to introduce a new system of no-fault separations, nicknamed ‘divorce on demand’.

The Marriage Foundation maintains that marriages are more stable because couples who do choose to marry are more committed, and that the rate of relationship and family break-up is far higher among couples who live as unmarried cohabitees. Cohabiting relationships are estimated to be three times more likely to break up than marriages. Foundation chief Sir Paul Coleridge, a former High Court family judge, said: ‘To be in gold medal position in the European race to reduce divorce rates is an accolade for which we can, as a nation, justifiably be proud.

‘Now the challenge is to persuade those who do not marry that their informal cohabiting relationships are inherently far less stable or beneficial, which is not at all good for them and disastrous for their children.’

‘We can justifiably be proud’