Jayne Dowle: If marriage is marvellous, please give us a break

Since 2009, when weddings were at their lowest ebb since Victorian times, the number of ceremonies has gone up by 3.7 per cent. So David Cameron has got his wish. Whatever is prompting the change, it looks like we’re returning to family values.

With this kind of evidence before him, is he going to make good his promise and introduce a married persons’ tax allowance? The time is surely right to embrace the zeitgeist. Or perhaps not. With marriages now officially on the increase, handing out rebates to the growing numbers of those who tie the knot is going to cost the Government more money. And if the trajectory continues upwards, this could become both expensive and embarrassing to back out of in the future.

And, you might ask, how will it ever come to pass when the Deputy Prime Minister’s view on married tax breaks is diametrically opposed to that of Mr Cameron?

Nick Clegg, sweet old liberal thing that he is, argues that couples should marry for love, not to get a bit of cash back from the State. He also makes the darker point that it is not the job of government to “micromanage or incentivise people’s own behaviour in their private lives”. He’s got his own ideas, of course, with his proposal to raise the income tax threshold to £10,000. So, with these two bickering like Darby and Joan, no wonder there hasn’t been much progress.

But in a year when it’s all been doom and gloom on the tax front, wouldn’t it be a positive move? These new figures have emerged as part of the Prime Minister’s much-heralded “Happiness Index”. It found that married couples are happier, healthier, blah, blah, blah, than their single or divorced friends.

Well, those of you who are married might raise an eyebrow at this, especially if he left the toilet seat up this morning, or she left the bathroom looking like an explosion in a make-up factory as she dashed out the door, but overall, it seems, marriage makes us content.

And with plenty of respect to all my friends who have cheerfully cohabited for decades bringing up their children together, it has to be said that in general, married parents are more likely to stay together than pack their bags at the first sign of trouble.

Again, I’m generalising, but estranged fathers who have been married to the mother of their children are more likely to keep up contact after a relationship break-down than those who have never been legally bound together. I’m not sure about micromanaging or incentivising, but anything that encourages a bit of stability in the world surely can’t be a bad thing.

Getting married does make sense, all things considered, but each to their own. I don’t shove my wedding ring in people’s faces, and I don’t expect those who chose not to marry to lecture me. I must admit though, I do find middle-aged couples who bang on about their freedom when they have sired a brood of kids and have their names on a joint mortgage slightly irritating.

Yes, I am thinking about Ed Miliband, who eventually got round to marrying wife Justine almost a year ago, but without about as much enthusiasm as a man going to the scaffold.

The point is, if David Cameron is doing this expensive and time-consuming Happiness Index to find out what makes people happy, then surely he has to follow through with policies which support the nation’s state of mind.

Otherwise, what’s the point? He is going to have to steel himself for a major domestic with his other half in Number 10 if anything useful is to come of it. And he must look closely at the way his proposal would work. A married couple’s allowance which benefits only those couples where one stays at home while the other works would help only the poorest and the richest in society. Yet again, those of us in the middle, with two working spouses, would be stuffed.

For the record, I was a child bride, ahem. Anyway, I can remember ticking the box for the original married couples’ tax allowance until it was abolished in 1999. I wasn’t old enough to understand it properly then, but I am old enough now to work out that such a scheme could possibly be worth something like £1,600 a year to me and my husband.

It’s our 20th wedding anniversary in August. That’s “china” apparently. If George Osborne wants to give us a long-service award in his forthcoming Budget, it will be very welcome, thank you. And it will be a lot more use than a new tea-set.