State-funded weddings could help solve the UK’s loneliness epidemic and save employers more than £2bn a year, according to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), which is calling for the government to offer low-income couples £550 to put towards their cakes and flowers.
The think tank, founded by Iain Duncan Smith, said married people were found to be significantly less lonely than single people but that people were discouraged from tying the knot due to the high costs of weddings. While the average wedding in the UK clocks in at around £20,755, the CSJ suggested their more modest contribution could go a significant way towards the expenses of a registry wedding, which on average costs around £1,342. Funding would also be contingent on recipients attending a marriage preparation course to ensure relationships were “stable and secure”.
The report emphasised the specific advantages of marriage over cohabitation, with married people apparently less lonely than those who just live with their partners. The CSJ called the conflation of marriage and cohabitation in government research an “act of historic neglect”.
Couple relationships are mentioned frequently as being a protective factor against loneliness, but there is no discussion of marriage as a separate type of relationship that is associated with less loneliness than cohabitation. This is a profound oversight and an act of historic neglect by government.
The CSJ commenting on work commissioned by the DCMS
It was noted that marriage rates had fallen to record lows despite a continued desire for holy matrimony. According to the think tank, less than six in 10 young people will ever get married, despite 80 per cent wanting to. “There is a mismatch between the relationships that people aspire to and the ones they will go on to experience,” the CSJ said.
But while the report was confident its £500 handouts would help sort this out, here at City A.M. we suspect a perhaps more likely cause for this gap: an extreme shortage of eligible men.