Supporting marriage this way penalises those who divorce or stay unwed.
The government has announced its long cherished introduction of a tax break for married couples.
The government argues that marriage is the glue that beholds our society together. I agree. Although I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with just living together, the reality is that married couples’ relationship are more likely to endure that those who are unmarried and their children are more likely to do well in life.
However, I think that the married couples’ tax break makes no sense whatsoever.
Its aim to support marriage. That means its purpose is to encourage people to marry and to deter them from divorcing. However, it’s only worth about £200 a year. That’s £3.85 a week or, to put it another way, one Starbucks latte a week. Furthermore (and I say this with my tongue firmly in my cheek), the average cost of a wedding nowadays is between £15,000 and £20,000. If you splurge on a wedding, you won’t get your money back for between 75 and 100 years. The number of centenarians in our society is growing, but I doubt that many marriages will last that long.
Is anyone really going to decide to tie the knot just because their tax bill will fall by £3.85 a year? I doubt it.
Furthermore, if you get divorced, you lose the tax break. I doubt that having to pay the taxman another £3.85 per week will feature highly in the considerations of couples who have realised that their marriages have irretrievably broken down.
While this may sound odd for a divorce lawyer to say, I am all in favour of marriages being saved where they can be saved. (My marketing is not aimed at encouraging divorce, it’s all about encouraging people who divorce to instruct me. I often give new clients leaflets about Relate). However, when my clients come to see me, most of them tell me that the marriage has irretrievably brown down. The reality is that when a marriage comes to the end of the road, it needs to be brought to an end, hopefully in as amicable a manner as possible, with a couple resolving their differences and agreeing how to divide their assets between them as fairly as possible. It seems unfair to penalise divorced people by making them pay more tax (even if it’s only £3.85 a week) because a marriage has broken down, especially if they did not want it to end.
It’s also unfair to unmarried couples. The government has indicated that it will not reform the pitifully inadequate cohabitation laws in this country as it believes that this will weaken marriage. Unmarried cohabiting couples do not currently have sensible laws or procedures to allow them to achieve a fair division of their assets that meets their needs. Many people naively believe that they are in a common law marriage, with the same or similar rights as married couples, despite such things being abolished in the eighteenth century. Ignoring the reality that huge numbers of people choose not to marry is not going to make the issue go away.
28 September 2013