Divorce (Financial Provision) Bill [HL]

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I strongly support the Bill of my noble friend Lady Deech. She set out the case for it in her usual eloquent and systematic way, and she has almost certainly said all that really needs to be said. I will take only a few minutes of the House’s time to reinforce some of the points that she made.

I have been close to too many divorces which have tragically gone to court. The reason for the courts becoming involved has seemed to be, time and again, that each side has, perfectly reasonably, come to a completely different conclusion about their rights to their property. The Bill would greatly reduce the number of contested cases, as others have said, and that must be in everyone’s interests—and most particularly in the interests of children, who inevitably suffer months, if not years, of instability that could be avoided. Also, importantly, these contested cases lead to much greater animosity between the parents than would otherwise be the case. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind and in the minds of most other people that really poor relationships between children’s divorced parents are always far more detrimental than any financial settlement could compensate for.

Reform in this area has become more pressing as divorce has become more commonplace, as my noble friend Lady Deech pointed out. There are 110,000 divorces a year, involving about 500,000 people, including children. Help for those suffering individuals must surely be a priority. Our Prime Minister has said that her priority is to help ordinary people who are going through great difficulties in life. I cannot think of many people who are going through more difficulties in life than the children of a divorcing couple.

A major concern is the loss of legal aid to this area of the law and the growing number of people with modest means representing themselves in court—50,000 in 2013, as we know from the Library briefing. This, in the context of a lack of clarity in the law, leads to endless adjournments and delays as the litigants and judges struggle to find a way towards a solution. My noble friend referred to the careful and sensitive exercise of judicial discretion in these situations, and I think that that is perhaps the only point on which I might disagree with her. In my experience, judges in the lower courts struggle terribly to deal with the conflicting accounts and mountains of paper, and there is no question that on occasion they come to erroneous decisions. These then have to be sorted out in the appeal court—and, again, an appeal means yet more months of delay and yet more waiting around and uncertainty.

An important reform in this Bill is that prenuptial agreements would be binding on the conditions set out, as my noble friend Lady Deech made clear. In my view, this alone could achieve a significant reduction in cases reaching the courts, to the benefit of all.

I have to say I find it extremely difficult to understand the conclusion of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, that somehow confusion and uncertainty are a help to the children involved.

The fact that a very similar law has been in place in Scotland for some years and is operating successfully simply reinforces the argument that the Bill should be given government time to reach the statute book. There is no need for a pilot and no need for concerns about unintended consequences; we know that the Bill would work.

At a time when government takes the views of the public exceptionally seriously, it is of note that, in this case, 72% of those asked in a YouGov poll supported the proposal that the courts should recognise prenuptial agreements. Perhaps the Minister would like to comment on the public support for such a reform and on whether the Government have a response to this that is different from their response to the Brexit vote.