The latest data on Families and Households in the UK in 2025, released today by the Office for National Statistics, conceal the epidemic of family breakdown facing children brought up in Britain’s unmarried families.

Few big changes to family types in recent years – married, cohabiting and lone parent families – suggests there is nothing to worry about.

Between 2015 and 2025, for example, the proportion of households with dependent children headed by a married couple has risen slightly from 59% to 61%; families headed by cohabiting parents has fallen slightly from 16% to 15%; and families headed by a lone parent have also fallen slightly from 25% to 23%.

Among households with dependent children headed by a couple, the proportion who are married has remained at 79% while those who are cohabiting has fallen slightly from 21% to 19%. The slack is taken up by the emergence of civil partnerships who have risen from 0.1% of couples with dependent children a decade ago to 1.4% today, following the new law that allowed heterosexual couples to sign civil partnerships from December 2019.

What these small changes conceal is the sheer scale of family breakdown.

Previous analysis by the Deaton Poverty Review, and a similar analysis from Marriage Foundation, reveal that nearly half of all teenagers are not living with both natural parents. This is far above the anodyne figures above that report one quarter of families headed by a lone parent. These figures also conceal that this is mostly attributable to split ups among cohabiting couples, and the relative success of marriages whose divorce rates have now fallen to 1970 levels.

On 15 June this year, Marriage Foundation and the Centre for Social Justice will release the striking new findings of my PhD thesis, recently completed at the University of Bristol, which challenge previous research findings and shed new light on this important but neglected social policy issue.

Dr Harry Benson, Research Director, Marriage Foundation, 17 April 2026