Last week the Office for National Statistics published figures on what it described as a ‘new social trend’. According to a report by Oxford statistician John Haskey, the number of ‘living apart together’ – LAT – couples, is now broadly in line with the number of cohabiting couples. Using the 2002-2003 General Household Survey, Haskey estimated that around 1 million couples can be classified as LATs – 3 in every 20 men and women between 16 and 59 who were neither married nor cohabiting at the time of the survey. The study showed LAT-ing to occur most frequently amongst the 30-34 year old cohort, with around 20% of these couples living in separate accommodation. To not exaggerate the phenomenon, Haskey sought to eliminate ‘casual’ daters from the figures, by excluding teenagers and students in the count.
Haskey offers numerous explanations for what The Times described as this ‘social revolution’, but he identifies the common theme as 'risk aversion'. This risk is described in the report as faced by divorcees with children, professionals with jobs in different cities, those caring for relatives and those striving to protect their children’s inheritance rights. Haskey is emphatic that the rise of LAT-ing signifies neither less commitment, nor greater individualisation. Rather, the increasing number of LATs is indicative of ‘caution…holding people back from situations they [see] as risky’.
Whilst Haskey states that the LAT phenomenon may have implications for public policy, he delves little into the extent public policy has contributed to the phenomenon. The role of government policy matters exactly because of LAT-ing’s association with risk aversion: does policy contribute to the risks of living together as a couple?
The answer is yes. Directly and indirectly, tax and benefit policy is making living together concretely less advantageous – riskier – for some, and certainly doing little to encourage other couples to do so. For low-income couples with children the effect is direct, though inadvertent. Where both partners are either on minimum wages or Jobseekers’ Allowance, current tax-credit arrangements mean that a child’s quality of life improves if the parents split and live separately. The rationale behind this – a fusion of lone-parent protection and an aversion to favouring the ‘traditional’ family – is understandable but shortsighted. In their bid to lower child poverty, New Labour have myopically focused attention on reducing poverty in lone-parent households. With the very close association between poverty and lone-parenthood this is logical targeting, however it also produces negative side effects. One problem is that although low-income couples may not purposefully split-up for improved tax-credits, there is no encouragement whatsoever for them to stay together. The other issue is that although poverty is condensed in lone-parent families, there are in fact more poor children living in couple-families – and these families receive no comparable support.
From a demographic perspective, policy may be defeating a desirable goal. It seems likely that, for example, the non-existence of joint taxation for married couples, dissuades people from the risks of committing to each other: potentially impacting on birth rates. Returning to the government’s reluctance to endorse the traditional family, rewards for couple parenting have been withdrawn from welfare arrangements. With no incentive to marry on a pragmatic level, couples further delay settling down together and having children. Why this matters, is because the UK has a below replacement level birth rate, a key contributor to this being late first-childbirth.
By not investing in commitment, and effectively dissuading many from making that commitment, government policy’s perpetuation of risk aversion is generating risks of its own.