Marriage rate falls to its lowest level since records began

Marriage has slumped to its lowest level since records were first kept more than 150 years ago, official figures have revealed.

The proportion of couples tying the knot has fallen back into line with its declining long-term trend following a clampdown on sham weddings.

The popularity of marriage has been waning since 1973, but in recent years it has been artificially boosted by such bogus unions. In London alone, new rules which make it harder to use marriage to win the right to stay in Britain cut the number of ceremonies by more than a third.

But the report from the Office for National Statistics said the crackdown was responsible for only some of the steep decline.

It said the long-term fall in the popularity of marriage was continuing, with millions of couples choosing instead to live together and delay having a family. The figures, which cover 2005, the same year the new rules were brought in, show the number of weddings in England and Wales dropped by more than 28,000, from 273,070 to 244,710.

The fall brought the marriage rate, the number of people marrying compared to the population as a whole, to its lowest level since records were first kept.

The figures show that 12 people married in 2005 for every 1,000 unmarried individuals. That compares with a figure of 27 in 1851.

The proportion of married people among the adult population is now only a fraction over a half, at 50.3 per cent.

This figure compares with 54 per cent in 1997 and more than two thirds in the 1970s.

The report said: "There is evidence that London, a location with a greater than average proportion of non-European nationals, may have seen an effect from the legislation, either in removing sham marriages, or in delaying and deterring marriages."

The findings show that the law putting limitations on the marriage rights of those from outside Europe had an immediate impact after it came into effect in February 2005.

Under the rules, anyone without the right to live in Britain must get a certificate of approval from the Home Office before marrying, and must give notice of the marriage in one of 76 designated register offices.

However, the ONS said the action against fake marriages was 'certainly not enough' to explain such a large drop in marriages.

The analysts said marriage rates had picked up in 2002 and 2003 in advance of the 2005 slump. They said couples were influenced by a number of factors that compounded the effect of sham marriages.

In 2003 and 2004 widespread publicity about the state of marriage, the legal rights that go with it, and discussion over the intromarriageduction of gay civil partnership may have encouraged more couples to marry, the report said.

It added that other influences on the figures could be migration, because incoming migrant groups include those with more commitment to marriage than the existing population, and the growing fashion for people to marry abroad.

Critics of marriage insist that the institution reached heights of popularity in the 1950s and that in past centuries people married in similar numbers to now.

In recent years the decline of has come alongside the abolition by Labour of the Married Couples Allowance tax break, the removal of references to marriage from official documents and register office signs, and the growth of the tax credit benefit system which discourages people from living as a couple.

The drop in marriage has also meant that the teenage wedding - a phenomenon that caused great concern in the 1960s and 1970s has virtually died out.

Last year the number of teenagers marrying dropped to fewer than one for every 1,000 single people.

Gays who embark on civil partnerships are usually much older than heterosexuals who marry, the ONS figures show.

The typical age of men entering civil partnerships is 53.9 - 17 years older than men getting married.

Lesbians going into civil partnerships were on average 46.1 years old, while for women getting married the average age was 33.6.

There were 18,059 civil partnerships in the first 12 months of the new system for formalising gay relationships.

Numbers tailed off after 2,000 partnerships were registered in the first possible month of December 2005, so that in the last three months of last year the monthly average was 794.