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Marriage is in terminal decline, Government figures showed yesterday. Within 25 years nearly half of all men in their mid-forties and more than a third of women will not have walked up the aisle. In the same period, the number of people cohabiting will have more than doubled to nearly four million. The figures published in a Population Trends report by Whitehall actuaries prompted fresh warnings from family campaigners that Government policies had marginalised marriage. Cohabitation was less stable, the campaigners said, ending on average after under three years, with profound implications for any children involved. The report said that by 2031 40 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women aged 45 to 54 in England and Wales would not have married. "At the age of 45 to 54 the proportion of people married is projected to fall from 71 per cent in 2003 to 48 per cent in 2031 for men," a spokesman for the actuary department said. "For women, the figures are 72 per cent to 50. "The proportion of those never married by 45 to 54 is expected to rise over the same period from 14 to 40 per cent for males and nine to 35 per cent for females." Among those who did marry, there would be small further increases in divorce rates at most ages, the spokesman said. The marriage projections have great implications for Government policy, as well as significant sociological effects. For example, terms such as mother-in-law and father-in-law will become far less common and there will be far fewer hefty divorce settlements in favour of women. The number of cohabiting couples is projected to rise from two million to 3.8 million in 2031 and they will also be older on average. The number of people living together at the age of 45 to 64 is projected to rise to 1.25 million men in 2031, compared with 375,000 in 2003, and from 317,000 to more than 1.1 million women. Jill Kirby, of the Centre for Policy Studies, said: "The serious decline of marriage is a very worrying development. Cohabitation is an inherently fragile partnership. "It is not divorce which will have a serious impact on children in the future but parents moving in and out of different relationships in which marriage is not a factor. "A lot of women in their forties and fifties will be living alone, perhaps having had a relationship or two but never having been married, with all sorts of emotional and financial implications. "The question is: do we want these predictions to come true or do we want to try to recover some of the virtues and values of the past?" As marriage declines, figures show that the number of children born to unmarried mothers has risen by a third in the past 10 years alone. More than 42 of every 100 babies were born outside marriage last year, up slightly on the previous 12 months. In 1994 the figure was 32 per cent and in the early 1970s it was less than 10 per cent. Robert Whelan, of the Civitas think-tank, said: "Of all the statistics that show our problems this is the one that matters most. There needs to be a programme to educate the public in the problems associated with children brought up by one parent." Statistical evidence says that children brought up by married parents tend to do better than those of cohabiting couples or single parents. But ministers have stripped marriage of its legal and financial privileges. Labour has abolished the married couple's allowance and its tax credit system of benefits favours single parents. Research presented recently to the Royal Economic Society found that husbands and wives were significantly more satisfied with their lot when their spouse was happy but couples who lived together outside marriage could not hope for such fulfilment because they did not depend so much on each other. Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, suggested that when couples married they became more interdependent. "Marriage is when two people become one," he suggested, "and cohabitation is when two people remain two." The copyright of Telegraph Group
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