SUPPORT FAMILIES

BROKEN HEARTS
Family decline and the consequences for society

The family is the heart of society. If the family fails, society breaks up. Yet family stability has been in remorseless decline over the last 30 years. At the beginning of National Marriage Week, Jill Kirby presents the evidence of child neglect and social disintegration in Broken Hearts - Family decline and the consequences for society, published tby the Centre for Policy Studies.

Today in Britain there are more children born outside marriage, more teenage pregnancies and more children in poverty than at any time in our history. Britain has the highest divorce rate in Europe, the highest proportion of teenage pregnancies in Europe; and the highest proportion of lone parents in Europe.

Recent moves to reduce the distinction between marriage and cohabitation ignore the evidence. The children of both lone and cohabiting parents are more likely to suffer physical abuse than the children of married couples; to experience mental breakdown; to turn to drugs; to commit crime; and to run away from home. And a cohabiting couple is far less likely to remain together after the birth of a child than a married couple.

Government efforts to tackle child poverty are dealing only with symptoms, not causes. Where the state intervenes to replace family support, it provides greater incentives not to marry.

It need not be like this. Most other European economies have fiscal instruments of support for marriage, through joint taxation. In Britain, family commitments have become largely irrelevant to tax assessment, whereas in most of Europe adults with families to support are paying tax at much lower rates than single earners.

For the sake of the children and to repair the damage to society, it is time for the state to signal its approbation and support for the structure most successful in maintaining social stability: the married family.

Jill Kirby throws down a challenge to today's politicians and opinion-formers: first, to openly acknowledge the link between family stability and a strong and peaceful society and second, to implement policies which will turn the tide. "Unless we are prepared to recognise that the family is under siege and that marriage is under threat, we can have no hope of reversing the trend and improving the lives of the children who are afflicted."

In the author's words: "The nurture of children should be a primary objective of every civilised society. The perverse consequence of our fiscal, social and welfare policies has been to incentivise and institutionalise child neglect. It is time for a new approach."

§ Broken Hearts - family decline and the consequence for society is published today, Monday 11 February 2002, by the Centre for Policy Studies, 57 Tufton Street, London SWIP 3QL. Price £7.50.