The singer Charlotte Church, known for her angelic soprano voice and fortissimo alcohol consumption, has become pregnant; last week she announced that she and her boyfriend were delighted.

Church, 21, and the rugby player Gavin Henson, 25, have been an item for two years and have lived together for the past 18 months. She has publicly expressed her love for her partner, saying “he’s the one”. But they have no plans to marry.

“We’re both really young,” she said. “I’ve got a great career and so has he.” In other words, marriage — who needs it?

Nobody is particularly surprised at this. In the eyes of many, having a child with a cohabiting partner or as a single mother is nothing unusual, whether you are a celebrity or not. It’s just the way things are in modern Britain, many people would say.

So it is all the more notable that politicians, who have long ducked any moralising about traditional family units, are suddenly talking about parenthood and plighted troth.

For years most MPs, all too vulnerable to their own sexual misadventures, have thought the topic taboo. Tony Blair’s new Labour has happily tried to micro-manage us into eating vegetables, smoking less and recycling more. But extol the benefits of the traditional family? Not a chance.

Instead it has taken the Tory leader David Cameron to light the blue touchpaper with a recent speech picking up on a Unicef report that judged Britain to be one of the worst countries among developed nations for the wellbeing of children. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” Cameron said. “We have too many children behaving like adults and too many adults behaving like children.”

He went on: “If we are to rebuild our broken society we have to get the foundation right. And the foundation of society is — or should be — the care of children by the man and the woman who brought them into the world.”

He was careful to defend single mothers and lone parents, saying they do “the hardest job in the world”. But he was also clear that he wanted to see “more couples stay together, and we know the best way to ensure this is to support marriage”. Blair was quick to respond, mindful that a recent spate of murders of teenagers in south London had ignited debate about lawless children.

At his monthly press conference on Tuesday he admitted that “of course marriage is a good thing”, but declared that society wasn’t broken. The important issue, he said, was not whether families were headed by people who were married, cohabiting or single, but how to help the relatively small number of problem families at the bottom of the pile.

That evening Alan Johnson, the education and skills secretary, whose daughter Emma is a single mother of two living on benefits in a council house, was blunter. “It’s not who or what the parents are,” he said. “It’s what they do. Our family policy must be bias-free.”

Common sense or too glib by half? Critics point out that the current tax and benefit system is in fact biased — against two-parent families and in favour of lone parents. They also say that it does matter who parents are because the evidence overwhelmingly shows that the children of stable, arguably married, couples have much better life chances than others.

The debate seems to have touched a nerve. Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader who headed a recent report into “Breakdown Britain”, said: “I thought it would be hard to break down the ramparts of the liberal establishment, who made you feel like some neanderthal if you talked about marriage. But the debate has moved on. We are at the apex and it is going to tip over.”

He says disintegrating families and their social consequences are costing the country about £20 billion a year — the equivalent of 6p on income tax — and ruining the lives of children.

Plum Sykes, a writer whose parents divorced and who last year published a book called the Debutante Divorcée, said: “I think David Cameron is absolutely right to say that for nurturing a child, marriage is the best thing. It’s great he’s coming out and saying that.”

On the other hand, Kathy Lette, author of How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints), said: “The fall in marriage statistics is about sexual politics, not party politics. Women are fed up with marriage because instead of Having It All, we’ve ended up Doing It All.

“Politicians should never make statements about marriage. It will always remind us of the ‘back to basics’ of John Major. Not only was he doing the horizontal tango with Edwina Currie, but I think the entire Tory cabinet was running off to brothels to be whipped with bits of wet lettuce.”

Leaving the wet lettuce aside, have the costs of family breakdown become so high that it’s time for politicians to be morally courageous again? Should the system be rebalanced in favour of marriage? And what is the best way to help children prosper? THE social shift in parenting in just a couple of generations is enormous. Nearly 50 years ago 90% of children in the UK were still living with both their parents at the age of 16. Now one in three children will experience the separation or divorce of their parents before the age of 16.

But it is not just divorce rates that jumped sharply over this period. Marriage rates have fallen back too. In 1971 some 68% of the population was married; by 2001 that had fallen to 54% and is projected to decline to 41% in 2031.

In 1980 just 12% of all births in the UK were outside marriage; by 2004 the figure was 42%. In 1986 just 11% of men under 60 and 13% of women were cohabiting; in 2004 the figures had risen to 24% and 25% respectively.

None of this is especially remarkable when compared with other northern European countries that have experienced similar trends. Cohabitation among the young is more marked in France, Austria and Denmark than it is in Britain.

Where Britain stands out, however, is in the incidence of lone-parent families, where we lead the European league by a large margin. Some 15% of all children in Britain are now born and brought up without their father. In 2005, nearly one in four dependent children in Britain — 3.2m of them — were living in a lone-parent family.

It is this group, accounting for a disproportionate drain on welfare and judicial resources, that politicians and experts of all political hues are most worried about.

Official statistics show that some 70% of young criminal offenders come from lone-par-ent families. Children growing up in lone-parent families are twice as likely to suffer a mental disorder as those living with married parents. And the rising numbers of lone-parent families is one of the biggest reasons for housing shortages. A total of 95% of lone-parent families are receiving benefits or tax credits, with 45% claiming housing benefit.

Most disturbingly, young single motherhood is a self-perpet-uating problem: girls who come from broken or fatherless homes, and whose mothers gave birth in their teens, are much more likely than the norm to have teenage pregnancies. Young women from the lowest social class are 10 times more likely to become pregnant in their teens than those from the highest social class.

To a large extent the problem is confined to the urban poor. In nine London boroughs more than 40% of families with dependent children were lone-parent families in 2001. The highest were Lambeth (48%), Islington (47%) and Southwark (46%).

Ethnic biases are also marked: 57% of families of black Caribbean descent with dependent children are headed by a lone parent (according to 2001 figures); among blacks of African descent the rate is 47%.

By contrast, 85% of Indian families with dependent children are headed by a married couple. Those least likely to be lone parents are Muslims and atheists. It’s also atheists who are most likely to cohabit.

WHAT should or can be done? Politicians within both main parties are at odds with each other and their colleagues.

Labour’s approach has been to develop a so-called “child focused” policy. As in America, tax credits have been used to tempt single mothers off traditional welfare benefits and into the workplace. The policy has increased the income of lone-parent families and Labour claims to have reduced the proportion living in poverty from 57% to 48%. But it has yet to have any real impact on the number of lone-parent families, which is still rising.

The Conservatives are now pushing for a change. It is not enough, they say, simply to encourage people back to work. Politicians need to rebuild the institution of marriage.

Patricia Morgan, an independent social researcher on the political right, characterises Labour’s morally neutral approach as a liberal conspiracy. “Certainly in Labour you’ve got all these ideological feminists from the 1960s and they have a plan to eradicate marriage.”

Conspiracy or not, there have been significant changes over the years militating against marriage. Reform of the divorce law in 1969 made divorce much easier. As marriage became less of a monolithic norm, cohabitation rose.

The financial advantages of marriage have also eroded. In 1986 the Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson proposed a reform to the system that had given married couples an extra tax allowance. He was to modernise it, replacing it with one where couples could transfer any unused allowances between themselves. In other words, there would still be a financial benefit to being married, but it wouldn’t discriminate against women.

The married couples allowance was duly scrapped and husbands and wives were taxed independently. But recession cut in and transferrable allowances were never introduced.

There are still a few tax advantages associated with marriage — spouses can transfer assets between themselves without incurring capital gains or inheritance tax liabilities — but the one big financial advantage to being married while alive has gone.

In turn cohabitation has helped to fuel the rise in lone-parent families. According to the Breakdown Britain report, nearly one in two cohabiting couples that have a child separate before the child’s fifth birthday, compared with one in 12 married couples.

A separate study, known as the Millennium Cohort Study, found that all cohabiting couples were more than twice as likely to split up as married couples, regardless of age, income or social background.

Blair instinctively supports the family and one of his earliest initiatives was to set up a ministerial group that published a consultation document on the subject. “Family life is the foundation on which our communities, our society and our country are built,” wrote Jack Straw as home secretary in 1997. “Families are central to this government’s vision of a modern and decent country.”

But what could have been the beginning of a family-friendly strategy soon floundered. The Labour left said the government was following the Tories in demonising single mothers. Paul Boateng, then a junior Home Office minister, was heavily criticised for speaking out in favour of marriage.

The consultation document went nowhere. From then on, all relationships were equal, and in terms of entitlement to benefits and tax credits, lone parents became the winners.

With Blair’s premiership waning, confusion among ministers is even worse. John Hutton, the work and pensions secretary, whose father walked out when he was a child, says his experience convinced him that two parents are better than one. Hutton has challenged the special status of single parents in the welfare system, saying he wants to introduce a more level playing field between lone parents and couples with children.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies gives the example of a couple with children where the husband goes out to work and earns £15,000, while the wife has a part-time job paying £5,000. As a couple they get benefits and tax credits worth £2,317. But if they split up, the wife on her own will receive £7,785 from the state, a difference of well over £5,000.

“There can be very significant advantages from declaring yourself as single rather than as part of a couple,” said Stuart Adam, an IFS researcher.

But Harriet Harman, a minister for constitutional affairs, has waded into Cameron with glee, posting messages on the popular website Netmums. “We let him stand there lecturing men to stay with their families, when there are men in his own shadow cabinet who can’t do that,” she said.

Attacking Cameron’s suggestion that there should be a tax incentive for marriage, she said: “Cameron says he is sending out a message about the importance of marriage, but the only message this idea sends out is about him. He just hasn’t thought it through. Is the Revenue going to hunt for men and check they are still living with their wives?”

At the same time the Tories have their own doubts. Despite the lead set by Duncan Smith and Cameron, insiders say Oliver Letwin, Cameron’s policy chief and mentor, is fearful that “banging on” about marriage will undermine the campaign to show the Conservative party has changed.

One senior Tory strategist said: “We have to be so careful about this. We don’t want people to think we are just the same old Tories, going on about the same old issues.”

Privately Francis Maude, the party chairman, is said to share Letwin’s concerns. However, both Cameron and his chief adviser, Steve Hilton, are convinced that pushing marriage is the right thing.

Cameron’s spokesman said: “David has said that the family should be at the heart of everything we do. And the central building block of the family is marriage, so society and the government must do their bit. We will have a policy of recog-nising marriage through the tax system — we are just not putting figures on it for now.”

The Tory leader has also said that any tax benefit for married couples would also apply to gay couples in civil partnerships.

To some observers it’s too late to try to turn the clock back. Jenny North, head of policy at Relate, the counselling service, said: “It is important that we encourage healthy and committed relationships [of all sorts] . . . but the Tories are caught wanting to go back to the old norms. You can’t go back. It’s washed away.”

The philosopher A C Grayling contends: “The main thing children need is love and stability, and it is a secondary matter how many people provide it. If we as a society are keen to ensure that children get the best start, let’s try to see that they are not brought up in poverty.”

On the other hand, even the poorest 20% of married couples are more stable than the richest 20% of cohabiting couples, according to the Breakdown Britain report.

North argues that such statistics on separation can be misleading: people who choose to get married are always more likely to stay together, she says. Other experts, however, say that the public commitment of marriage and all that it entails is self-reinforcing and helps couples stay together.

Jill Kirby, a social researcher attached to the Centre for Policy Studies, said: “The vast majority of young people still regard marriage as an objective. It is a question of translating those aspirations into reality, so that when they come to make the decision, they don’t do the sums and look at the facts and decide that perhaps it’s not worth it.”

Kirby says reforming tax and benefits is a “necessary but not sufficient” move; it will also require a bigger cultural message to make an impact.

Researchers of different hues tend to agree that restoring stable relationships also requires restoring opportunities and aspirations among deprived young men.

Morgan said: “I think there is terrible neglect of boys if they are not going to be university material. Are their jobs valued? Are they educated for them?

“Male breadwinning has become looked on as almost indecent. In the past they would have had a job with a bit more status. Men held a job because they supported a family, because it was expected of them. Now women support families and women have got to be put into jobs.”

What do ordinary people think of the debate? Jayne and Charlie Snowdon, who live in Sheffield, have been married for 21 years and have two children. Jayne is a secretary and Charlie and electrician.

Jayne said: “I think it is definitely beneficial for children to grow up in a two-parent family unit. I think a father figure gives a family a stronger hold.

“Having a father around — especially during the teenage years — is really important for discipline. We wouldn’t have teenagers going off the rails if there were more two-parent families. It would create a more loving and respectful society.

“Charlie and I have different ideas on discipline and I think if we were separated, this could be a problem. But because we’re a family unit, we work together. Cameron’s idea is good in principle. I think 90% of the problems in people’s marriages come from arguments about money. To give couples a tax break could, in theory, help them stay together.”

On the other hand, Lindsay Wall, 41, is a single mother from Bristol with a nine-year-old daughter. Wall left her daughter’s father when their baby was five months old. Having survived for years on her own successfully, she finds Cameron’s initiative “insulting”.

“Cameron is blaming single parents for gang culture and for teenage crime. But gang culture is about poverty — not the family structure,” she said. “Society is changing and the Tories need to accept that. Single parents are a growing number of people. Cameron might not want us here but we exist and he can’t ignore that.”

To be fair to Cameron, he is at pains not to demonise single parents. He does not want to prescribe people’s relationships. Instead, he simply wants to revive a message that has long been silent: that two-par-ent families, especially those headed by children’s natural, married parents, have great advantages for nurturing and should therefore be encouraged.

Labour, by contrast, offers no such judgment. Its stance is to provide no lead on personal relationships, but to help pick up the pieces when things go wrong.

In short, Cameron advocates marriage, Blair goes for Sure Start centres. It could prove an important divide.

Additional reporting: Olivia Cole and Isabel Oakeshott

Anthony Grayling, philosopher

The main thing children need is love and stability, and it is a secondary matter how many people provide it and what gender they are. By far the greatest problem with one-parent families is their lack of resources; if we as a society are keen to ensure that children get the best start, let’s try to see that they are not brought up in poverty, that there are excellent affordable childcare facilities for working lone parents, and that one-parent families are not stigmatised by old-fashioned conventional views about what constitutes a “proper family”.

PlumSykes, author

I think David Cameron is absolutely right to say that for nurturing a child, marriage is best . . . In England we have become far, far too PC. If David Cameron believes that traditional marriage is best for children then I think it’s great that he is coming out and saying that. That’s so much more refreshing than people who won’t say what they believe in or what they actually think.

In decline — but still popular

At the heart of the debate over families lies a gulf between the dreams of young people and the reality of relationships, writes Richard Woods.

The paradox is they want to say “I do” and live happily ever after, but just can’t seem to find the right person or the will to see it through.

There is no doubt that marriage has declined. The number of weddings in England and Wales has fallen from 415,000 to about 270,000 a year. And many are remarriages.

But this is not because people no longer aspire to get married. Opinion polls indicate the opposite.

In a Mori poll that asked people what lifestyle they would prefer, 68% opted for being married with children. Only 4% said they wanted to be unmarried with children.

An Opinion Research Business poll found that nearly 90% of young people wanted to get married at some point. And an online survey for the teen magazine Bliss in 2004 found that 92% of respondents “believed in marriage” and 60% felt couples should marry before having children.

People still love a good wedding. It’s an aspiration reflected in the celebrity marriages that fill Hello! and OK! magazines.

Yesterday, the paparazzi invaded Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire for the wedding celebrations of the model Liz Hurley and the Indian businessman Arun Nayar. There would have been no such fascination if they had just moved in together.

If the dream is there, why does it so often go wrong or fail to materialise? It is partly because the social stigmas that surrounded divorce and births out of wedlock have disappeared.

The nation’s most highly rated book, according to a survey last week, is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — but the sort of prejudice in Austen’s day that stigmatised having a child outside marriage is long gone.

Jenny North, head of policy at the counselling service Relate, said: “When you remove the social stigma of child rearing outside marriage, you have fewer reasons not to do it.

“We need to raise the aspirations around the quality of relationships so that people don’t have children very early on in uncommitted relationships.”

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