No Fault Divorce

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) for the way in which he has presented the case on this difficult matter. In one way, his arguments are very convincing. We heard all of them during the passage of the Family Law Act 1996, in which I took a great deal of interest. The then Government had a majority of one in the Standing Committee, and I was it. The Committee was very lively, loads of amendments were passed and many of these arguments flowed back and forth.

Some of my hon. Friend’s arguments sound compelling, and people might ask why we have not had more debate on this matter. No fault divorce has been occurring around the world for decades—even for half a century in some places—and we now have the means to evaluate its impact. That is what I want to talk about today. Of course I would like to make the moral case for marriage and for a lifelong commitment to children, but the House probably knows my views on those questions and I am not going to convince anyone I have not already convinced by repeating them, so let us look at the evidence.

The social researchers have done their job and the evidence is now available. If this were merely a matter of allowing a few cases of obvious irrevocable breakdown to be dealt with more quickly, cheaply and less destructively, very few people would oppose the idea. It would be a common-sense thing to do. But, while that is what my hon. Friend seeks, very honourably, to achieve, that is not the sole impact of no fault divorce. Unfortunately, all the available evidence points to the introduction of no fault divorce having a large, widespread and demonstrable effect on the societies in which it has been introduced. That is true across the spectrum of developed nations, from Canada and certain American states to Sweden and elsewhere.

The Prime Minister was right to highlight last week the numerous social problems we have yet to tackle, and we now have a much better understanding of how fundamental marriage is to preventing many of those problems. Despite the obvious problems that sometimes occur in a marriage, the emphasis in recent years has been on strengthening marriage as an institution. Bringing in no fault divorce, while seeking to ameliorate one problem, would undermine that new appreciation by making divorce easier, and thus increasing the number of divorces. That is the crucial point.

Let us look at the evidence from Canada. In 1968, the year the divorce legislation was amended to provide for no fault divorce, Canada’s divorce rate was 50 per 100,000 people. Within a year, that had risen to 150 per 100,000 people and by 1970 it had reached 300 per 100,000 people. That is a sixfold increase in just two years, after a century of relatively stable divorce rates. Scholars have noted similar results in US states correlating to when states introduced no fault divorce. The first significant study of no fault divorce was published in 1986, and all the further major published papers since then have concluded that the divorce rate increased at the same time as the introduction of no fault divorce. Do we want to increase the divorce rate? We know that the preponderance of evidence suggests that we will end up having more divorces and a higher divorce rate if no fault divorce is brought in.

What about the other impacts? A study in the US argued that 75% of low-income divorced women with children had not been poor when they were married, but Douglas Allen also points out in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy that

“the real negative impact of the no-fault divorce regime was on children, and increasing the divorce rate meant increasing numbers of disadvantaged children.”

That is what is happening in the United States, but what about Britain? Let us look at the 2009 evidence review produced by the then Department for Children, Schools, and Families. That report found that a child not growing up in a two-parent family household is more likely to grow up in poorer housing; experience behavioural problems; perform less well in school and gain fewer educational qualifications; need more medical treatment; leave school and home when young; become sexually active, pregnant, or a parent at an early age; and report more depressive symptoms and higher levels of smoking, drinking and other drug use during adolescence and adulthood.

Family breakdown is one of the key drivers in poverty for women. The scholar Allen Parkman has discovered that women living in American states with no fault divorce worked on average four and a half hours more per week than their counterparts in fault-based states. It also serves to widen the gap between the rich and the poor even further; a University of Essex study shows that half of all single parents are living in poverty. Even in that bright Nordic wonderland of Sweden the all-powerful and ever-generous welfare state has proved totally ineffective at breaking the link between family breakdown and poverty. There, parental separation is the biggest driver into child poverty by a large margin; among children in single-parent families, the incidence of poverty is more than three times as high, at 24%, than it is for those in families with two parents, where the figure is 8.1%. Furthermore, the number of Swedish households in poverty headed by a single parent is more than four times the number of households in poverty headed by couples.

We all know that hard cases make bad law. My hon. Friend’s motives in moving the motion are unassailable—they are even commendable. Not for a moment can we pretend that the current situation is good, efficient, useful or anything like ideal—I accept that. But when seeking to change that situation, we need to make sure that our actions do not have unintended consequences that fix one thing and make other things much worse. In the face of all this social research and all this evidence—I have had time to go into only some of it—we cannot pretend that no fault divorce will, on balance, have a positive impact on our society. That is what we have to look to, and I have set out what the evidence shows.

As I said at the beginning of my speech, I am not making any argument to do with morality; this is about evidence, scientific research and observable outcomes. Parliament does not exist in a vacuum. A Bill to bring about no fault divorce would have implications throughout the country and I suspect that that is why successive Labour and Conservative Governments have, in the end, balked at it. Other developed countries have introduced it, so we are capable of assessing its likely impact. I accept that there can be no doubt that it will lead to a simpler, less traumatic, less costly way of dissolving marriages that have suffered irretrievable breakdown, but the evidence shows that it comes with further consequences. Do we want to see more disadvantaged children? Do we want to see women poorer? Do we want to see women working longer hours? Do we want to see the wide variety of social problems that the Prime Minister so justly highlighted in Manchester last week deepen further in our society? The answer must surely be no.

This is an important issue and it deserves further debate on Second Reading. I will therefore not attempt to vote down the Bill on First Reading. But before a Bill such as this is passed into law we have to pause, look at the evidence and consider its impact on the most disadvantaged in society. My view is that, after that Second Reading debate, we may well conclude, as our forebears did, that, for all its faults, the current divorce law is worth sticking with.

Question put (Standing Order No.23) and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Mr Richard Bacon, Mr Keith Simpson, Mr Henry Bellingham, Ms Gisela Stuart, Fiona Mactaggart, Kit Malthouse and Norman Lamb present the Bill.

Mr Richard Bacon accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 4 December, and to be printed (Bill 77).