We still have a fault based divorce system in this country. This does not mean that divorcing spouses must hire private investigators and submit video footage definitively proving infidelity to a court in order to secure a divorce. It does mean though that some evidence needs to be put before the court to demonstrate that…
As Eurovision concludes for another year, and with European Parliamentary elections due to take place across Europe over the next three days, you may be interested to know that you have the opportunity to vote in a third European poll over the next couple of months. The European Commission wants to know about your views…
A recent research paper* has found that from a sample of 369 final financial orders in divorce, only 8 contained an order for “joint lives maintenance”, which is a sum of maintenance to be paid for life from one spouse to the other. This data was obtained from three courts around the country, one in…
Katie Rainscourt, our managing partner, has recently been interviewed by Lexis on the topic of prenuptial agreements, which is reproduced below. This article was first published on Lexis®PSL Family on 13 March 2014. Click here for a free 24h trial of Lexis®PSL: ‘Can_appropriate_reviews_make_pre-nups_stick’ Family analysis: What weight will the courts give to a pre-marital…
Yesterday’s budget announcements by George Osborne has focussed many minds today on their pension pots, and what the new greater flexibility may mean for them. The question of what happens to pensions on divorce though does not appear to be a question that many couples are asking or answering. In 2000 the “pension sharing…
The Children and Families Bill received Royal Assent yesterday morning, on Thursday 13 March 2014, and is now law. I have previously written in this blog about the impact of this Act on family law in England and Wales, and explored the introduction of the new child arrangement order on Children Act cases in this…
The Office of National Statistics has released its figures for divorce data in 2012, and advises us that the number of divorces in England and Wales increased by 0.5% to 118,140 compared with 117,558 in 2011. Of those 118,140 divorcing couples the “fact” proven in the petition was as follows: Year of divorce Party to whom…
So the dust has started to settle on the newly minted Law Commission report, after last week’s media flurry. There were several themes in the report that particularly caught my eye, but most of all was this concept of “bargaining in the shadow of the law”. The report describes how the work of a family…
For ease of reference, here is the link to Family Court Fees and Family Court Forms: http://hmctsformfinder.justice.gov.uk/courtfinder/forms/ex050-eng.pdf http://hmctsformfinder.justice.gov.uk/HMCTS/FormFinder.do
I was asked this week about who exactly is divorcing. Not in a Daily Mail celebrity “WHO IS DIVORCING?” way but rather, which sectors of our society are choosing to divorce? A really interesting question. The implication behind the question was that the removal of legal aid for family law is intended to have an…
