{"id":25975,"date":"2024-03-13T09:38:14","date_gmt":"2024-03-13T09:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smh.group\/?p=25975"},"modified":"2024-03-13T09:38:14","modified_gmt":"2024-03-13T09:38:14","slug":"a-significant-turn-in-marriage-demographics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devstagesite.co.uk\/smhgroup\/a-significant-turn-in-marriage-demographics\/","title":{"rendered":"A significant turn in marriage demographics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recent statistics on marriage and civil partnerships indicate a notable milestone<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u2018Population estimates by marital status and living arrangements, England and Wales: 2022\u2019, sounds like a rather esoteric piece of academic output from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). However, its release in late January attracted a brief flurry of media attention for one new finding it revealed:<\/p>\n

\u2018Married or civil partnered remained the most common legal partnership status among the population aged 16 years and over in England and Wales; however, this proportion has decreased from 51.2% in 2012 to 49.7% in 2021 and 49.4% in 2022, the first time this has fallen below 50.0%.<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n

The other story to this minority married proportion is an increase in cohabiting couples (140% up between 2002 and 2022) and the numbers of people \u2018not living in a couple\u2019 (17.7% up over the same period).<\/p>\n

It is probably fair to say that government responses to these changes in the pattern of living have, at best, been mixed as the tax system illustrates:<\/p>\n