Whatever you think about JD Vance, there can be no doubt that the US vice presidential candidate’s attack on ‘childless cat ladies’ has set a feline among the feathered.
First, there were angry tirades about the pressure and prejudice faced by single, childless women, then the paeans to living unanswerable to anybody else’s demands. But over the weekend, the argument here in the UK has turned to the economics of singledom, and worrying calls for state intervention cannot be far behind.
Several pieces in The Guardian note that solo people can expect to pay much more than their coupled peers for the same lifestyle. Described variously as a ‘singles tax’ or ‘singles premium’, not being able to share the costs of rent, groceries, pet care and much besides can cost individuals about £10,000 a year, according to UK Debt Expert.
Much of this is baked into fixed costs, as would be the case for a shared Netflix subscription. On occasion, the distinction is made explicit, as in the so-called ‘single supplement’ charged by hotels when a single person occupies a room intended for two.
The single are also excluded from many of the group rates enjoyed by couples, examples including gym memberships, railcards and arguably even two-for-one cocktails. ‘It’s ridiculous – society gives discounts for nice things to those who already have someone to share the cost of the essentials with’, one single person complained to The Guardian.
There is, of course, some ignorance about basic economics here: sharing scarce resources is simply more efficient than keeping them to yourself. A hotelier could justifiably claim that providing a double bedroom costs about the same whether one or two people are sleeping in it, even if you have to wash an extra towel in one case.
Even when serving more people is more burdensome, group rates often pull in more customers than solo offers would – and finding punters is hardly cheap in most industries. For a well-managed business, couples’ discounts are therefore entirely rational.
This all makes calls for a ‘miracle solution’ alarming. But if you believe that the high costs of singlehood are gravely unfair, rather than a reflection of fundamental costs, it’s hardly surprising that you would be inclined to ask the state to rebalance things.
Earlier this year, a council representing a district in Brussels signed up to a charter to treat single and multiple-occupancy households equally. ‘It is our interest as policymakers to no longer think from the perspective of the traditional family as the norm, but to strive for measures that are neutral to living arrangements’, the charter said.
Some of the potential policies are well within government’s remit: designating event invitees as ‘plus ones’ rather than suggesting a spouse. The risk, as with the suggestion that businesses are encouraged to provide a wider selection of wine by the glass, is that the scope expands towards regulation and even subsidy.
After all, solo households, whether or not there is a cat in residence, are becoming increasingly common in many countries. In 2023, 8.4 million people were living alone in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics, with the proportion of single-occupancy households having grown over the previous decade.
This growing constituency is therefore likely to become more vocal with claims that ‘society invisibly discriminates against those without partners – expecting more of them in the workplace, for instance, then robbing them through a tax system that prioritises married and family units’, as the writer Emma John puts it.
But even just looking at economics, you have to wonder how any government could accurately tot up the costs of being single, let alone create a system to balance the books. It is not merely that the discrepancies reflect the costs of providing the goods and services; they also track differing preferences between people, coupled, single or otherwise.
It would be a bad idea for the Government to intervene in this way. Effort would instead be better spent on addressing Britain’s fundamental problem for the past 15 years, namely its sluggish growth. As noted in a recent report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, median incomes were up only 6% between 2009-10 and 2022-23. Had a recession not intervened, growth could have been as high as 30%.
You can combine those dismal figures with lacklustre housebulding and infrastructure investment. In recent decades the housing stock has expanded by a mere 8%, down from a peak of 18%. As ‘The Case for Housebuilding‘ by the Centre for Policy Studies states: Britain ‘has been building fewer homes than it needs to’, with renters and mortgage payers alike paying the price.
No doubt, some singles will always carp about paying more than their peers who are spoken for. But many more would likely not care if the good life was readily affordable to them. The Government should promote economic growth for everybody – irrespective of relationship status.
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