Under fire: Sir James Munby

The country’s most senior family judge was under fire from politicians and colleagues yesterday after saying that the collapse of the traditional family was to be welcomed.

In a speech Sir James Munby, president of the Family Division of the High Court, said there was a new reality of single parent households, same-sex marriages and adopted families.

He said this was ‘a reality which we should welcome and applaud’.

The applause for new forms of family life, delivered in a lecture at Liverpool University and published at the weekend, is a step further than any major figure in public life has yet travelled in the direction of rejecting the two-parent family as the best pattern for raising children.

While politicians have over the past 30 years have ignored or downgraded the role of marriage – Tony Blair’s ministers tried to remove the word from official records and even register office signs – they have routinely praised the importance of the two-parent family for the well-being of children.

Research evidence collected over decades has shown that children of intact two-parent families do better at school and enjoy better health than children affected by family break-up or who have lone parents. Parents who undergo divorce or break-up also lose out in financial, health and other well-being terms.

While academics have argued over whether marriage is important to the strength of couple relationships, few have questioned the assumption that the two-parent family is best for both adults and children.

Sir James’s remarks were criticised by Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader and work and pensions secretary, who has long argued for greater state support for married couples.

‘The present system does not help couples stay together, but makes it more likely that they will split,’ Mr Duncan Smith said.

‘The UK faces a complete collapse of family commitment through marriage, particularly among people who are on low incomes. We ought to be concentrating on helping families stay together rather than helping them break up.’

Mr Duncan Smith said that the cost of family break-up to the state, including the price of state benefits and additional health care, is estimated to run to £50billion a year. ‘If that was caused by something economic the Government would move heaven and earth to stop it,’ he said. ‘But because we are afraid of offending people we have failed to do anything. We should be moving to stop family break-up.’

Sir James Munby, president of the Family Division of the High Court

The Marriage Foundation, the pro-marriage pressure group founded by Sir Paul Coleridge, the former High Court family judge and colleague of Sir James, said that the president of the Family Division had stepped outside the proper bounds for judges. Its research chief, Harry Benson, said: ‘I would never dream of criticising a senior judge on legal matters.

‘But Sir James has stepped well outside the court in saying “we should welcome and applaud the end of the nuclear family”.

‘At a time when we have the highest rates of family instability in the entire developed world precisely because of the trend away from relatively stable marriage, this is like saying that we should welcome and applaud the existence of ill health or broken legs.

‘Yes, we must care for, support, treat and prevent brokenness. But to welcome and applaud it is a rare lapse of judgment.’

In his Liverpool speech, Sir James, who is to retire this summer, said: ‘In contemporary Britain the family takes an almost infinite variety of forms.

‘People live together as couples, married or not, and with partners who may not always be of the other sex. Children live in households where their parents may be married or unmarried.

‘They may be brought up by a single parent, by two parents or even by three parents…

‘Their siblings may be only half-siblings or step-siblings… Some children are conceived by artificial donor insemination. Some are the result of surrogacy arrangements.

‘The fact is that many adults and children, whether through choice or circumstance, live in families more or less removed from what, until comparatively recently, would have been recognised as the typical nuclear family.’

Sir James said: ‘This, I stress, is not merely the reality; it is, I believe, a reality which we should welcome and applaud.’