THE FAMILY GREEN PAPER: The dream of the ideal family is now a thing of the past

GIVEN THE importance of the family and the seismic changes it has experienced, it is amazing that governments have not been more interfering.

Take marriage, for example. In 1994, the number of first marriages for both partners had halved to 174,000, the lowest since 1889, despite a much larger present-day population. Men and women are also getting married later - they are over 27 and 25, respectively, the oldest they have been for 60 years.

Meanwhile, cohabitation has become the rage. Back in the Sixties, fewer than 5 per cent of women lived "in sin" before marriage. Now 70 per cent of those who marry have cohabited beforehand. In Britain, the proportion of all births occurring outside marriage in 1995 was 34 per cent, up from 8 per cent in 1971 and 13 per cent in 1981.

Then there is the stunning rise in the proportion of lone parents. In 1970, one in twelve families was headed by a lone parent. By 1986 that figure had risen to one in seven. Today it stands close to one in four. The fastest growth has been in lone mothers. The proportion they form of all families with dependent children has risen from one in thirty in 1970 to one in twelve today.

These changes have coincided with more people living alone. Over one- quarter of households have just a single person living in them today. One in ten men aged between 25 and 44 now lives alone, three times the proportion a generation ago.

Governments are increasingly worried by this fragmentation of the family and what they can do. They fear the burden that will be placed on the state as a result. Especially when they are confronted by the dismal picture portrayed by Patricia Morgan, a family expert at the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs.

"A growing proportion of men and women," she said, "are not living with anybody, as families fall in numbers, grow smaller in size and shorter in life-span, and the fewer children are increasingly products of fatherlessness, broken or fragile relationships. On the face of it, is it easy to be optimistic about tribe x?"

Ms Morgan thinks it is possible to turn the tide in favour of traditional marriage. "Of course you can," she says. "The Government controls the tax and benefit structures which provide incentives for marriage. We know that divorce and lone parenthood are closely correlated with economic changes.

"You can also control the legal machinery. The watershed here was the 1969 Divorce Reform Law, which effectively abolished marriage by creating a system which allowed unilateral no-fault divorce. That change made divorce very insecure." Ms Morgan also highlights the "sexual revolution" as being a factor in all these changes, and the end to the "shotgun" marriage as being crucial in creating lone parenthood.

In certain respects Patricia Morgan has been proved right about the powers of government. In Sweden in 1989, there was a 200 per cent increase in marriage, an unintentional consequence of the government changing the rules about widows' pensions.

That said, the political centre and left are not willing to undertake the drastic legal and financial changes that might turn back the clock. Hence the liberal language used by Jack Straw yesterday as he spoke tolerantly about the various family arrangements people may choose.

The centre-left is in any case unconvinced that government can make a fundamental difference to the type of families that we live in. They look around northern Europe, Australia and north America and see similar social change there. It is clear to them that Britain is not simply idiosyncratic.

"The evidence from other European countries points towards cohabitation becoming more, not less common," said Kathleen Kiernan, a co- director at the LSE's Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion. Ms Kiernan argues that Britain is, like other developed countries, going through a transition in the way men and women become couples and partners. In the first stage, cohabitation is judged deviant, in the second it functions as a prelude to marriage, in the third it becomes socially acceptable as an alternative to marriage. In the fourth, cohabitation and marriage become indistinguishable with children born and reared within both. Sweden has almost reached stage four with Britain somewhere between stages two and three.

So what can governments do? The answer from the Green Paper seems to be that it is best to swim with the tide rather than waste effort trying to turn it back. So, although there are polemical gestures towards making marriage more popular, no one in government imagines that wedding bells will resound through the land as a result.

The Government is keen to concentrate on practical skills, on making people better at parenting and better at relationships rather than trying to push them into certain kinds of relationships. So it is likely to pay considerable attention to those most likely to benefit from help - fathers.

As Secretary of State for Social Security, Harriet Harman championed women in family policy. But since her departure, there is an appreciation within Jack Straw's Home Office that much can be done to harness men's aspirations to fatherhood.

The Green Paper only touches this issue. But fathers are the next job for the Ministerial Group on the Family, which Mr Straw chairs.

Fundamentally, the aim of this Government seems to be piecemeal and pragmatic, to do whatever is necessary to cut the cost in terms of crime and benefits produced by poor parenting and relationship breakdown. Far from being archaic, its limited ambition seems to fit with people's passion for self-improvement and good health.