The divorce rate has hit a 22-year low, according to statistics that suggest younger married couples no longer regard it as a “get out of jail free” card when things go wrong.

However, the figures from the Office for National Statistics show that growing numbers of the over60s are still dumping their partners and reclaiming their independence.

Experts said that the overall decline may reflect a reluctance among married couples whose own parents were divorced to inflict the experience on their own children.

Claire Tyler, chief executive of the counselling organisation Relate, said: “The current generation of married people is far more likely to have seen their own parents go through divorce than the generation before them. They know the impact it had on their family and on themselves and the thought of repeating that pattern weighs heavily on their minds.”

Julia Cole, a leading relationship counsellor, agreed: “We have gone from the mindset prevalent in the late Eighties and early Nineties that if you weren’t happy you could just get divorced to one where people realise that divorce is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

“More people see now that it causes pain for adults and that it is particularly difficult for children if it is not an amicable split.”

The figures for England and Wales show a fall last year in the divorce rate to 12.2 for every thousand married men and women. This is the second consecutive annual fall. The 2005 figure was 13.1.

There was also a drop in the number of divorces, itself a reflection of a long-term decline in the number of marriages. Last year 132,562 married couples divorced, a drop of 6.5 per cent on 2005 and the third annual drop in succession. This is the lowest since 1977.

Divorce rates were highest among people in their late twenties – although overall, the average age of people divorcing was higher, at 40.9 for women and 43.4 for men.

Divorce rates for both men and women fell across all age groups, apart from men aged 60 and over, where there was a small increase. Ms Tyler said that greater longevity was at the root of this latter trend. “With greater life expectancy, people have more ambitious ideas about what they want from life as they get older,” she said.

Marilyn Stowe, head of the family law unit at the lawyer Grahame Stowe Bateson, said that the overall fall in the divorce rate reflected changes in society with fewer – but often more stable – marriages.

“One reason could be that more couples are living together than is generally recognised,” she said. “Couples are also tending to marry later and therefore their marriage may be likely to last – because they are making wiser decisions,” she said.

Andrea McLaren, of the London matrimonial practice at the chartered accountant Grant Thornton, said that highly publicised big-money divorce cases that had gone through the courts may be deterring both those considering marriage and those contemplating divorce.

At Relate, Ms Tyler added that today’s married couples were more willing than those of previous generations to seek couple counselling when things went wrong.

She added, however, that the fall in the divorce rate was disguising the true picture of family breakdown because the statistics do not show the high number of cohabitees who split up.

Last year 125,000 children aged under 16 experienced their parents divorcing. A similar number of children experienced their cohabiting parents going their separate ways.

In Scotland there was a near-20 per cent surge in the number of divorces, up from 10,940 in 2005 to 13,014 last year. The Office for National Statistics said that the hike could be the result of a sharp cut in the required separation period that came into effect in Scotland in May last year.

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