Marriage tax breaks

Quote by foxylady2209
My ha'p'orth.
A good relationship between the parents is infintitely better for the happiness and stability of the children than a bad relationship. No relationship is better than a bad relationship. And a good relationship does not have to include a marriage certificate, civil partnership form or even cohabitation. It's about time spent and communication.
This next bit is compicated - bear with me, I hope it makes sense.
You take 100 couples who are living together. A portion will be in weak realtionships, some will be in unhappy relationships and some will be in a good, solid relationship. If those 100 couples go through the process of considering marriage, agreeing to marry, how, where and when to marry, who will sit with Aunty Muriel at the reception etc etc etc you will have filtered out a fair number of the first group and a most of the second group. Some in the third group will be perfectly content not to marry but will stay together. The very process of getting married will filter out many couples with relationships that are likely to fail in the future. Therefore it is fully understandable that fewer married couples split than unmarried ones. It's just a statistical thing - nothing to do with marriage 'making relationships stronger'. Marriage indicates a relationship that was stronger in the first place. It is a correlation - to a causation.
The next bit isn't complicated.
Marriage is too easy. The legal steps for starting a marriage are too easy compared with the legal steps for ending a marriage. A marriage breaks down, the couple may still be managing a civilised communication, especially of there are children. The process of breaking the legal ties that are all that remain of the emotional ones, can often destroy the last vestiges of regard that exist between these two troubled people. There is nothing good that can come of making hurt, humiliated, angry people fight every step of the way away from each other. This harms the children and contributes to the fact that the parent who visits the children (too often the father) often loses the relationship with their children. I read some time ago that within 2 years of a divorce 80% of fathers had essentially lost touch with their own children - heartbreaking.
Marriage/civil partnership should not be encouraged without encouraging serious consideration of the exit strategy.
And, after all that, no I don't agree with married tax allowance. What I would support is 'partner can't work so shares their tax with the working partner' allowance. The 'can't work' could be children under school age, one partner being full time carer for someone, one partner being severely disabled etc etc etc.

Quote by Ben_Minx
A divorce costs about 300 quid in court fees n form filling if you do it yerself and negotiate with your spouse.
I assume the £13,000 arises from employing lawyers to negotiate child arrangements and financial distribution.
The latter aspects are similar whether the couple are married or co-habiting. My experience is that cohabiting couples are less likely to involve lawyers than the married, simply because folk are under the misapprehension that the dissolution of a marriage requires professional input.
SO going back to what I said, divorce is cheap, sorting things out can be expensive.