Marriage Foundation Celebrates its 5th anniversary

Jul 15, 2017 by

Marriage Foundation has just celebrated its fifth anniversary with a meeting of its Advisory Board and an evening reception at the London offices of Killik & Co. Paul Coleridge thanked the guests (which included Iain Duncan Smith, above) at the reception saying that “without the support of our friends, partners and supporters we wouldn’t exist at all.” He said: “Five years on we have confounded our critics. Time and again our research has injected reality and hard evidence into the debate around marriage which the media has widely broadcast”.
Sir Paul’s interview in The Times

In an interview in The Times to mark Marriage Foundation’s fifth anniversary Paul Coleridge said that government ministers “tried to pretend marriage did not matter”. He added that “The cost of family breakdown to the public purse and the impact on the least well-off is beyond doubt. Seventy per cent of young offenders come from one-parent families. However, the so-called ‘couple penalty’ caused by the financial advantages of benefits to people living apart — a whopping £7,000 a year — endures.” He also pointed out that teenage mental health issues, child abuse, domestic violence and abuse, the social care crisis, the housing crisis — every one is either primarily caused by, or massively exacerbated by, the scale of family breakdown.

Children’s Commissioner for England’s report makes devastating reading
A recent report from the Children’s Commissioner for England makes devastating reading about how millions of children in England are growing up in vulnerable or high risk environments.  Lord Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi (who was the main speaker at the launch of Marriage Foundation in Middle Temple Hall five years ago) remarked that “These are shocking figures and doubtless there are many causes. The single biggest factor, and this has emerged from every piece of research over the last fifty years, is the collapse of marriage as an institution.”

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