I don’t! Yearly marriage rate will fall to 1 in 400 couples

COHABITING couples are sounding the death knell for wedding bells – with almost no one expected to marry in 40 years’ time.

In fact, just one in 400 couples are predicted to tie the knot each year by 2062, according to a report by the Civitas think-tank.

It is urging the Government to review tax incentives for couples to ‘rescue marriage’ from its ‘exponential decay’.

The report said: ‘Marriage is disappearing in Britain.

‘2021 was the first year on record that the number of children born to unmarried couples exceeded the number of children born to married couples.’

It added: ‘We urgently need a plan to rescue marriage. Britain is a country where family breakdown falls disproportionately on poorer children.’

Marriage rates peaked in 1972 at 74 per 1,000, according to the Office for National Statistics. That had fallen to 18 per 1,000 by 2019 – or 213,000 weddings that year.

Civitas predicts the number tying the knot in England and Wales will plummet further to 5.2 per 1,000 in 2062 – equivalent to 67,000 weddings, or one in 400 couples.

The think-tank, which works on democracy and social policy issues, added: ‘Exponential decay is used to show that this originally leads to a fairly sharp decline in marriage rates, but that decline generally slows over time. Marriage will never quite finally die, but will become increasingly obsolete.’

Report author Frank Young said there had been a societal shift away from marriage, triggered in part by successive reforms that make it easier to divorce.

He said: ‘Marriage is the most stable form of family relationship. Nearly nine in ten parents still together with children aged 13 to 15 are married. Cohabiting parents are three times more likely to break up than married couples.

‘Couple families with children have a one-in-four chance of living in poverty, compared to lone parents, where this figure is more than half.’

Mr Young added: ‘If the Government wants to address family stability and promote stronger relationships as part of a wider domestic agenda it cannot afford to be neutral about marriage.

‘Reference to marriage has almost disappeared from Government policy documents, despite evidence that it provides the most stable form of relationship.’

Civitas warned Chancellor Jeremy Hunt not to use the black hole in the UK’s finances to cut the Marriage Allowance, which lets spouses transfer their personal tax relief and reduce their tax bill by up to £252. The report claimed that fewer than half of eligible couples actually claim the tax break – resulting in a £2.4billion underspend since it was introduced in 2015.

Civitas added: ‘Not only does the current allowance fail to reduce disincentives to form stable couple relationships, but the Government is also not spending the money set aside to support married couples.

‘Future governments should resist any attempts to cut the Marriage Allowance and instead find ways to review our taxation of families to improve family stability and support parents. This will involve longer-term planning as opposed to short-term cuts, but could be popular with the public.’