A national commission should be created to tackle Britain’s “epidemic” of family breakdown, a senior judge said yesterday.

Mr Justice Coleridge, a Family Division judge, said that the commission should establish marriage as the “gold standard” for relationships and put an end to the constant games of “musical relationships” or “pass the partner”, which can scar children for life.

The consequences of the nation’s “endless and futile quest for a perfect relationship” are now so great, he said, that they can no longer be treated as a private matter. No single political party can solve them either. Only a commission drawn from across the country would have any chance of success.

Mr Justice Coleridge, who presided over the divorce of Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, sparked controversy in April last year when he warned of a “cancerous” meltdown of family relationships in Britain. He said that the effects of this would, within the next 20 years, be “as marked and as destructive as the effects of global warming”.

In a similarly strong speech last night to the Family Holiday Association in Central London, he called for the emergence of a collective “new stigma” against broken relationships and parents who were in a “complete and uncontrolled free-for-all where being true to oneself and one’s needs is the only yardstick for controlling behaviour”.

He added: “Although, superficially, these are private issues, they become matters of public concern when they are happening on such a huge scale and affect detrimentally such a significant proportion of the population of all types and ages.

“What is a matter of private concern when it is on a small scale becomes a matter of public concern when it reaches epidemic proportions. An epidemic is a matter of concern for us all, especially where so many children are infected by it.”

Recent figures show that one in three marriages in the UK ends in divorce. One in ten children lives with cohabiting parents and a quarter live with a single parent.

Mr Justice Coleridge said: “The re-emergence of a public attitude which is anti-relationship destruction, a new stigma perhaps, could do a lot to stem the flood.”

He suggested that, while he favoured some rights for co-habiting couples, marriage was the better solution. “Marriage is by no means perfect or the only way or only structure for living with a partner, but statistically it has proved to be the most enduring and, statistically, the children of such relationships perform the best,” he said.

“That is a simple, provable fact which has to be faced, however unpalatable to its detractors. Support for marriage therefore makes pragmatic common sense because it is demonstrably in the public interest and ultimately saves money.”

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