The state should encourage marriage and try harder to get couples to stay together while their children are young, ministers have been told.

A drive to persuade couples to marry rather than simply live together would help combat high break-up rates among cohabitees, a report said.

It also called for state spending to concentrate on families with young children, because this is the time when family relationships are under the greatest pressure and have the highest chance of breaking up.

The recommendations were prepared by the Marriage Foundation think-tank in response to a call from Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith for ideas on how to keep families together.

Mr Duncan Smith’s Family Stability Review is aimed at gathering information on how families are changing, which are most at risk of failing, and how the state can do more to keep them together.

The Marriage Foundation, which was launched by High Court family judge Sir Paul Coleridge, said in the first published evidence to the review that the families most at risk are those of unmarried new parents.

It said that cohabiting couples make up fewer than one in five parents, but half of all family breakdown.

The foundation’s report added that half of all family breakdown happens before a couple’s child reaches its second birthday.

It said that once couples reach the ten-year mark, outside factors seem to have very little influence on whether or not they stay together.

Foundation spokesman Harry Benson said: ‘There is little point in the Government attempting to improve the stability of established marriages. Approximately as many married couples who stuck it out between 1960 and 1970 are still together as those who married in 2000 and made it to 2010, despite the many social and cultural changes in that period.

Mr Duncan Smith¿s Family Stability Review is aimed at gathering information on how families are changing

‘What we need to do instead is to encourage couples considering having a family to marry and then support them through the trouble-filled early stages.

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A prominent High Court judge, Sir Paul Coleridge, has been reprimanded by the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice, and found guilty of ‘judicial misconduct’.

It is a serious ruling. Has Sir Paul been consorting with members of the criminal classes? Was he caught driving under the influence? Or perhaps he has delivered a spectacularly wrong-headed judgment?

The answer is that he has done none of these things, or anything at all reprehensible. The Judicial Conduct and Investigations Office, which acts on behalf of the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice, has taken exception to Sir Paul’s views on marriage, of which he is strongly in favour.

You may think he is accused of proselytising his opinions during court cases, but that is not the charge. No, Sir Paul has fallen foul of the authorities because he gave an interview to The Times newspaper almost exactly a year ago, and wrote a piece for the Daily Telegraph last June. For these little acts of candour he must be punished.

He suggested during the interview that the Government had spent too much energy in championing gay marriage, which he thinks is of minority concern, and too little energy in supporting married couples. But he emphasised that his independent charity, the Marriage Foundation, did not take a stance on gay marriage.

In the Telegraph article he took issue with a report which suggested that stable couples tend, whether married or not, to do equally well. He argued that this is beside the point. The crucial issue is that co-habiting couples are far more likely to break up than married ones, with all the resulting harm to children.

Until quite recently Sir Paul’s beliefs would have been shared by most judges. (He thinks they still are, but I have my doubts.) His views are empirical rather than sternly moralistic. As a judge in the family courts for more than a decade, he has seen at first hand the devastating consequences of family breakdown.

As he put it in a recent article he wrote for the Mail (for which he hasn’t been censured, or at least not yet), ‘study after study’ has shown that ‘the single most vital factor, by far, in the successful development of children is a committed, healthy relationship between their parents.’

And such a relationship, he observed, is far more likely to last if the couple are married. According to research carried out by his pro-marriage organisation cited in his article, ‘cohabiting parents account for only 19 per cent of all couples — but the separation of cohabiting parents makes up 48 per cent of all family breakdowns’.

What alarms me is that an intelligent man who has been presented with more evidence of family breakdown in his professional career than most of us, and who has studied and thought about the reasons for its rapid increase over recent years, should have had his knuckles publicly rapped by the Judicial Conduct and Investigations Office.

It goes without saying that judges should not make political remarks, but Sir Paul’s comments cannot be so construed. He was expressing his considered beliefs — beliefs that would have been held by about 99 per cent of sentient beings until quite recently.

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Marriage is on its deathbed. A tiny tax allowance won’t save it. Nor will benevolent old judges such as Sir Paul Coleridge urging young couples to wed before starting a family.

In fact, Sir Paul of all people should understand what the  law has done to marriage. After 1969, in most of the Western world, the marriage vow was legally meaningless.

All those moving promises about ‘for richer, for poorer’,  or ‘in sickness and in health’ (let alone ‘till death us do part’) were cancelled by Parliament. From then on, one party to the marriage could end it more  easily than you can get out of  a car lease.

And if the other spouse resisted, and wanted to stick  to the vows he or she had made, he or she could, in the end, be dragged from the family home by the forces of the State backed with the threat of prison.

For the most part (but of course not always), it was  men who were compulsorily dumped. The law helped this to happen. It didn’t matter how badly either party behaved. Women increasingly got custody of the children, because they were women.

The same went for the family home. The courts didn’t bother to enforce orders allowing  ex-husbands to stay in touch with their children.

Hence Willie Nelson’s bitter joke: ‘I’m not going to get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and buy her a house.’

In the end, the surviving marriages in our society exist entirely because both parties want them to. The  State, the law, the tax system, the schools, the benefits system and our culture offer  them no support and plenty  of penalties.

And if women wonder why they cannot get men to marry them these days, they just need to check the legal position. It  is amazing that so many men still do. The day is coming when the only people in Britain who want to get married will be lesbian clergywomen.

I know you think this is just me being extreme and pessimistic. But it isn’t. One of this country’s finest legal minds, Baroness Hale of Richmond, now sits on our alleged Supreme Court as its Deputy President.

But back in 1982, when she was just the barrister Brenda Hoggett, she wrote prophetically that the efforts of English law to make the sexes more equal had, in fact, destroyed most of the legal privileges of marriage. ‘Family law no longer makes  any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union,’ she wrote.

‘Logically, we have reached a point at which, rather than discussing which remedies should now be extended to the unmarried, we should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purposes.’

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A High Court judge, who is stepping down after being rebuked for campaigning in favour of marriage, claimed yesterday to have strong backing within the judiciary.

Sir Paul Coleridge said only ‘one or two’ of his colleagues were opposed to his traditional views.

He spoke out after being given a formal warning by Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas and Justice Secretary Chris Grayling for judicial misconduct.

An inquiry by the Office for Judicial Complaints, the body that polices the behaviour of judges, had found his speeches and newspaper articles were ‘incompatible with his judicial responsibilities’.

Last December the office advised Sir Paul to take a lower profile after he had protested about the devastating impact of family break-up on children, criticised cohabitation, and called for greater support for marriage.

Sir Paul, who handles family cases as Mr Justice  Coleridge, could have served for another five years and was effectively forced out.

He said: ‘I would like to refute the erroneous suggestion that my fellow judges are opposed to what I have been doing. With one or two exceptions they have been very, if quietly, supportive.’

Sir Paul said he was a whistleblower who needed to speak out against the collapse of family life.

He confirmed his decision to step down as a judge in April – a resignation announced earlier this year – was linked to his public attempt to speak up for marriage.

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