It has become common for the cost of weddings, including wedding dresses, flowers, receptions, dances, etc., to be of the order of (or even exceed) £10,000. Many people now cohabit for an extended period until they can afford a wedding (in some cases for five or even ten years). The costs of weddings has thus become a material barrier to marriage and hence an issue of public policy interest. I propose that if David Cameron is serious about his commitment to encourage marriage (as I believe he is) then one of the first actions he should take in government - perhaps even before tackling the "couple penalty" in the benefits system - is to tackle the excessive and socially damaging cost of weddings.
I note that what follows is intended completely seriously, and I consider it a matter of great policy significance.
The most straightforward mechanism to begin curtailing the price of weddings would be to request of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) an investigation into those markets providing wedding services - dresses, flowers, food etc.. In particular, it would be of interest to understand whether the OFT regards wedding services as a genuinely competitive market. In a number of markets competition authorities reject the apparent "on the surface" competition on the grounds that once people have begun to investigate the transaction they are already captive, in some sense, so that the apparent option of going to another, cheaper, provider is only an illusion. For example, if a couple goes along to a provider of wedding reception services, is there really an option of hearing the price and leaving to chose another wedding reception provider? Or is a reception really something to which, once people have begun to investigate, the reception service provider is effectively a monopolist?
Similiarly, do wedding services providers offer special prices for weddings? For example, if you request of a meal service provider a lunch menu, will that provider offer you a materially higher price if you are having a wedding than if you are engaged in, say, corporate entertainment? If that is the common practice, is that really because people want much more expensive menus for weddings that for corporate entertainment, or are they subject to pressure because they are having a wedding?
If the OFT decides that wedding services are indeed not a competitive market, it might be appropriate to introduce price regulation so as to place caps on wedding services pricing. That could result in very material reductions in the prices of weddings and thence to people committing to marriage much earlier with less extended periods of cohabitation. Since empirical studies strongly suggest that people are more likely to stay together if they have exchanged vows in a wedding, this might result in a stronger society and a vastly improved context for the raising of children.
Perhaps the OFT would not decide that there was compelling evidence of market power amongst wedding services providers. There might nonetheless remain a rationale for price regulation. The reason is that because weddings materially reduce the probability that families subsequently become benefits claimants and that children subsequently become criminals or face marital breakup themselves, the costs of not marrying go far beyond the money exchanged in wedding services or indeed any of the foregone benefits of marriage of the otherwise-husband and otherwise-wife. Technically, then, there is an positive "externality" of marriage rather akin to the negative "externality" of burning fossil fuels or other pollutants.
The implication of the externality argument is that people are not willing to pay as much for their weddings as the social benefits to their getting married. One option in response might be to subsidize wedding services, in much the same way that green technologies are subsidized. On the other hand, it is not the wedding services per se that are of benefit. It doesn't make any interesting difference to the success of a marriage how elaborate was the wedding ceremony. Hence a better route might be to simply suppress the costs of weddings through price regulation. If that means that some of the more elaborate options for weddings cease to be available (e.g. if it means that the practice of paying thousands of pounds for wedding dresses worn only once in a lifetime disappears) there is, if any, only a modest social cost - again: it is not the wedding services themselves that produce the positive externality.
Another route might be to investigate the possibility of regulating wedding packages as a whole - producing a no-frills "stakeholder wedding" (akin to the ill-fated stakeholder pensions scheme). The point here would not be to ban more elaborate weddings but, rather, to ensure that anyone investigating having a wedding would be offered the option of low-cost wedding services.
A more exhibitionist variant of this concept might be to subsidize no-frills weddings - e.g. by formulating a no-frills wedding package (say, one that might cost £1,000), estimating the cost of a typical wedding (say, £10,000) and providing those that purchase the low-cost option with a splitting-the-difference one-off benefit (in this case, perhaps, £4,500) to celebrate their marriages. The objective of such a policy might be to break the culture of high-cost post-extended-cohabitation weddings and move society to a new low-cost pre-extended-cohabitation equilibrium.
Whether any of this would work I do not know. But I am sure that it is worth a try.
UPDATE: P.S. To anyone that has the thought that people enter into marriages too easily, and that the cost of a wedding is a useful deterrent to getting married when you are unsuited, I put it to you that the opposite is true. I assert confidently that the sheer costs of weddings lead to unsuited people who have already realised that they are unsuited getting married anyway, because the long planning times and enormous expense of marriages means that it is very expensive and embarrassing to back out once the process is underway.
I want people considering marriage to focus on whether they want to be married for sixty years, not on whether they can afford the cost of a wedding or, alternatively, whether they can face telling their parents who have already paid for their wedding that they no longer want to marry.
