ANALYSIS:Report questions efficacy of policies aimed at promoting marriage without tackling family poverty, writes CAROL COULTER
THE REPORT on financial disincentives to cohabitation and marriage, from the Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection, adds to the growing body of evidence that poverty creates instability in families, rather than the other way around.
It will provide very useful material for the debate on the efficacy of policies aimed at the promotion of marriage in the absence of steps taken to reduce family poverty. The report found that lone-parent families were at high risk of poverty, but also found that more children, in absolute terms, lived in poverty in two-parent families. Other reports have found that they are at higher risk of family breakdown. This led the committee to suggest the payment of a parental allowance for all low-income parents, replacing two existing payments.
The report found that the existing system of social welfare payments to lone parents acted as a deterrent to cohabitation or marriage, which results in the loss of a range of social welfare benefits. A disincentive could also occur where one or both parents were in low-paid employment.
However, it questioned whether such financial disincentives were the reason for the high levels of lone parenthood among people on low incomes. It pointed out that studies from the US and the UK found that perceived financial stability was closely related to a readiness for long-term commitment through marriage.
This was also revealed in an ESRI report last year on the family for the Family Support Agency by Pete Lunn, Tony Fahey and Carmel Hannan, which showed that the likelihood of marrying was related to level of education and social class, with those with only primary education the least likely to have married by the age of 40.
The same survey also showed that women with primary or lower secondary-level education had the highest likelihood of lone motherhood, and that marital breakdown was substantially more likely among lower socio-economic groups, leading to the formation of lone-parent families. While the report found there is also a disincentive in the tax system for lone parents to co-habit or marry, this is much less than in the social welfare system, and is concentrated among the lower paid.
Once a lone parent or a married or cohabiting working couple is sufficiently highly paid, the disincentives to family formation tend to disappear, and beyond a certain income level there are actually financial incentives to marry, which increase the higher the income becomes, when advantages in capital gains become relevant.