This pamphlet draws attention to the trend towards more people living alone – the fragmentation of households, and the associated decline of marriage among those households that still contain couples bringing up children. It asks whether these are the best arrangements to ensure that the next generation is successfully reared. The author argues that the trend is underpinned by fiscal structures which give no special encouragement to marriage and one-earner couples, which support the rearing of children on low incomes by lone parents, which create incentives for fraudulent non-declaration of living together by loosely bound unmarried parents, and which fail to enforce the responsibilities of absent parents. Hence the State is at war with the family, with the unintended consequence of perpetuating child poverty, in its attempts ot alleviate it, due to ‘perverse’ effects on family formation behaviour.

The argument that fiscal policy has fuelled the social trend leads to a call for policy reform to reverse it: reinstatement of tax allowances for married couples, more strictly enforced child support and a withering away of benefits to one parent families.

Although I have no problem with the idea that the policy framework helps to shape family formation (or non-formation), I would doubt whether the policies of themselves would have much impact, at least in the short run, as levers of reverse social engineering.

The fact that Britian’s (now modest) rate of teenage motherhood is higher than in France may partly be due to the different types of state cash support available, but may also be affected by differences in education and youth labour market opportunities. There is also, by international standards, relatively high teenage motherhood in USA and Australia, with their own versions of means-tested support for lone parents. It could be argued that both the policy regime and family structures are reciprocally affected by cultural values and traditions. In that case, changing fiscal policy would not be a quick fix.

Although some family-forming decisions are calculated and rational responses to incentives, as Patricia Morgan argues, other events, such as many early pregnancies are (still) unintended. The policies advocated in this pamphlet would make lone parents, and their children, bear the costs of unplanned procreation. She does not discuss the alternative or complementary policies of improving information and alternative opportunities for the minority of young women who drift into unpartnered motherhood.

Another shortcoming of the polemic is that it assumes only the state and the citizen are players on this stage and ignores the framework of the market part of economy as the major source of families’ livelihoods. The author calls for reinstatement of the breadwinner father as the most favoured arrangement for child rearing, without recognizing other ways of organizing the division of labour between parents which may avoid the erosion of skills entailed by mothers taking long absences from the knowledge economy. She is scornful about paternity leave, but I would suggest that employment practices for fathers as well as mothers need to be considered.

Her equally scathing condemnation of cohabitation is somewhat oversimplified, mixing evidence from various countries and periods of time, which hides a more complex and changing picture in the UK. Although many cohabitants do part company, many others do get married (30 percent of the unmarried parents in the Millennium Cohort over the 27 or so months between the first two surveys). At any one time cohabiting couples include those who are inhibited from getting married by the cost of weddings as much as a lack of commitment to each other and also a growing sub-group who feel so committed that they believe a formal wedding would devalue their relationship. Would fiscal privileges for marriage really cement existing relationships?

Patricia Morgan draws interesting attention to the growing numbers of men in mid-life who are living alone (and to their falling rate of employment). However, I would be surprised if there were any fiscally conceivable marriage allowance in income tax that would, on its own, lure many of them back into nesting mode.

Professor Heather Joshi

Institute of Education (IoE), University of London