Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill [HL]

Lord Mackay of Clashfern Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

4: Clause 1, page 2, line 8, leave out “20” and insert “46”
Member’s explanatory statement
This would extend the minimum legal period for a divorce from six months to one year (with the additional six weeks between the conditional and final orders).

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, I understand that the question to which this clause is an answer was in the consultation and that the answer in consultation was 12 months, whereas here it is six. I just wonder what superior knowledge the Government had in mind in going to six months when the consultation seemed to say 12.

I have had some experience in this area, 20-something years ago. When I proposed the 1996 Bill, I put in 12 months—that is what I am asking for now; I am nothing if not consistent—but on that occasion Parliament decided that it should in fact be 18 months. Putting it up by six months is something with which I am fairly familiar, so I invite my noble and learned friend to explain the situation.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, this amendment more than doubling the period before conditional order seems to be based on the proposition that the law obliging people to stay married for longer will either help children or encourage more reconciliations. In the debate on Amendment 2, speakers on all sides of the House demonstrated the fundamental commitment of us all to the welfare of children, who—as we all agree—suffer badly from family breakdown and its consequences. The noble and learned Lord spoke eloquently on that. For all the reasons given by many noble Lords in the earlier debate, I agree with those who have said there is no basis for saying that the children’s interests would be best served by denying or delaying divorce to one or both parties to a marriage who have determined on a divorce.

As for the second proposition, that keeping unwilling couples tied into a failed marriage for a longer period may lead to more reconciliations, the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. The decision to divorce is a hard one, rarely taken lightly. Of course, changes of mind occur. Separated couples often get back together—sometimes successfully and sometimes not, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, pointed out earlier—but in every such case they make the decision to reconcile willingly, not because they are obliged by law to try to do so. In some cases, of course, divorced couples even remarry each other. Again, that step is open to couples after divorce and is dependent on free will, not obligation.

Once the decision to divorce has been made, forcing parties to stay married for longer than is necessary to confirm that decision serves no purpose. Enforced delay rarely leads to reconciliation. It extends the unhappiness and uncertainty. It infringes on the parties’ autonomy, preventing them making decisions for themselves, arranging their new personal lives and futures, making safe and secure arrangements for their children and organising their family finances. It also—most significantly, I suggest—extends the hostility between the parties, who are frequently embittered by divorce proceedings and whose embitterment starts to heal only when the divorce is finalised and they go about the business of joint but separate parenting or building new, separate lives. This Bill is all about reducing bitterness by removing fault from the actual process of divorce.

The Government have proposed a 20-week period—reflecting other jurisdictions, such as New York and Finland—as appropriate for the confirmation of the decision to divorce. No period will ever be perfect to the week, but my belief is that the 20-week period to a conditional order is about right and is supported by the evidence. I commend the Government for choosing it.

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[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Keen of Elie) (Con)]

My Lords, when the Government consulted in 2018 on the Bill’s proposals, a number of headlines suggested that we were introducing quickie divorces; indeed, in some quarters, that misapprehension may linger. However, in a sense, we are putting an end to them. Under our reform Act, applicants cannot apply for a conditional order until at least 20 weeks have passed from the start of the divorce proceedings, along with the current six weeks between conditional and final orders, and that is a minimum period. Of course, progression from one stage to the next will never be automatic.

Applications for divorce are increasingly made online and the Government’s updated impact assessment, which was published last April, projected that, under these reforms, on average we would be adding between nine and 10 weeks to the divorce process based on the expected impact of full implementation of online divorce. So we are certainly not reducing the overall time for the average divorce. Indeed, at present rather more than 80% of divorces take place sooner than the timescale set out in the Bill.

I acknowledge that there is no magic number as far as this timing is concerned. A single divorce law must work for everyone and, in introducing the new minimum period before conditional order, we have carefully considered what period would most effectively help applicants consider the implications of divorce and allow couples to reach an agreement on practical matters without unduly lengthening the process. That is the purpose of the minimum period. It is certainly not intended to be punitive in any way.

The question then arises: why six months overall rather than a year or even a month? The Government have reflected on the different views put forward during the consultation and, at that time, some key organisations broadly supported six months as a reasonable period to meet the emotional and practical needs of divorcing couples. However, they also noted that there could be problems if that period was longer. Indeed, a period substantially longer than at present could unduly delay necessary financial arrangements, for example, and it would be particularly unhelpful if a couple had already been separated for a long period of time before the application is made. We therefore made the judgment that six months strikes an appropriate balance that allows a better opportunity for parties to adjust and a reasonable period for them to consider the implications of the step that they are taking.

As I say, there is no magic number. It is a case of exercising judgment and we consider that the period of 20 weeks, together with the six-week period, is appropriate in the circumstances, and we would not propose to extend that period by way of amendment to the Bill. In these circumstances, I invite the noble and learned Lord to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, of course it is a matter of judgment. I had to do the judgment some time ago. The other angle which has to be taken into account is that when the divorce proceedings are finished, parties are apt to lose interest in their responsibilities under the marriage that has been terminated. I have seen that as a matter of fact from time to time. For example, fathers who desert find it very difficult to remember to pay the necessary support money to the deserted lady. That kind of thing can be made worse if the divorce has been completed before all the financial matters have been settled. However, I agree that this is a matter of judgment, and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 4 withdrawn.

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[Lord Farmer]

I beg to move.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, I support this amendment on the basis that it is not right that the length of the notice should be determined solely by the applicant. The present definition of the start of the application is settled by the rules of court. It would be a good idea if the rules of court committee examined this matter because if it is willing to change the present rule to a rule that accommodates the need to make sure that the respondent has received some kind of notice, either as a deemed service or as an actual service, at the start of the proceedings, that would be satisfactory. It would also be satisfactory if it were left to the rules committee because who knows what difficulties might arise? Nobody can forecast every possibility. If it was with the rules committee it could make the necessary adjustment later without recourse to Parliament. It is good idea that the rules committee decides this question. I think that is the best answer to it.

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[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

The provisions of Amendments 7 and 17A clearly relate to an important aspect of matrimonial proceedings; namely, the financial settlement. The amendments seek to ensure that there are no discussions about such financial settlements for 20 weeks unless both parties agree. However, does this not illustrate the need for legal advice to be available to the parties, or at any rate to at least one of the parties, in the situation of a divorce? I understand that attempts were made to amend the Bill in that respect, but it was ruled that it was not possible to do so. However, will the Minister undertake to look again, or to persuade his colleagues in the Government to do so, at the issue of providing legal aid for matrimonial matters, particularly of this kind, where one party may well have insufficient resources to procure the necessary advice in this important area of the consequences of a divorce?

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, I very much support Amendment 20, which the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, spoke to. Not very long ago, I got a fairly impassioned letter from a gentleman I knew who had recently been involved in a divorce. He said that one of the great difficulties in approaching that, which he found by no means easy, was that it was not easy to find out what was likely to happen in relation to finance, and that it was extremely difficult to guess. The reason for that primarily is that the present structure involves a very large amount of judicial discretion. Those of your Lordships who have had the experience of prophesying how a judge will react will understand the difficulty that you encounter with that kind of thing.

Discretion, as I think Lord Bingham said, is a departure from the rule of law, because the discretion becomes the rule not of law but of the judge’s wisdom or lack of it. I remember the old judge in the Court of Session when I first went there: Lord Carmont. He used to say that if you give a thing to a man’s discretion —he was not thinking of women at that time—you commit it also to his indiscretion. The limit of discretion is quite wide.

I thought about trying to do something about this in 1996, but I concluded that it was too difficult to try to mould it to what I was trying to do then. It is probably right that it should not be attempted as part of this Bill. On the other hand, it is mightily necessary to get on with it and get a framework that can be used in the majority of cases. It is true that some discretion may be required—you do not want the framework to be too rigid—but you want it to be fairly clear that this is the way the thing will work unless there are special reasons requiring the exercise of judicial discretion.

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[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 19A is in my name. One of the headline Conservative Government commitments in the relatively recent past was abolishing the couple penalty. The couple penalty, noble Lords will recall, was the unintended fiscal incentive for a couple with children on low to modest incomes not to live together or marry because of the benefits that would be lost. Abolishing this was a headline Conservative manifesto commitment in the 2010 general election. At that time the Government’s primary concern with respect to marriage was the removal of obstacles to marriage, whereas today, their focus in this Bill seems to be on removing obstacles to divorce.

In this context, I have tabled this amendment for two reasons. First, I think that as the Government engage with this new task, it would be wise to pause to reflect on the progress made in relation to the earlier task of abolishing the couple penalty. Given both the importance of removing the couple penalty to help couples commit, and the potential for easier divorce to inflame the commitment problem in the presence of an ongoing couple penalty problem, it would be premature to prioritise making divorce any easier until we have dealt with the couple penalty problem.

Secondly, we must understand the impact of the couple penalty on divorce itself. If a couple on low or modest income manage to marry despite the couple penalty, they will none the less feel the negative impact on their marriage in that, if they were to terminate it, they would experience some fiscal benefits. For this reason, it is very important that we understand the impact of the couple penalty on divorce rates.

The main mechanism identified by the Government for addressing the couple penalty was the marriage allowance. A fully transferable marriage allowance was proposed by the Centre for Social Justice, commissioned by the Conservative Party and chaired by the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith MP in 2007, and adopted by the then Conservative Party leader, David Cameron.

Some upper- and middle-class people scoffed at this proposal, stating sarcastically that they got married for love. The idea that anyone would fall in love for fiscal reasons was plainly nonsense, and the suggestion that the purpose of the couple penalty was to assist in this regard only helped demonstrate just how out of touch with reality the wealthy scoffers were.

The point was simply that, when a couple fall in love and decide that they want to be together, they have a choice about what form their relationship should take. If formalising their commitment through a “till death us do part” marriage commitment would cause them to lose benefits, they would be more likely to formalise their relationship in some other, less stable way.

The point of dealing with the couple penalty was that, if the tax and benefit design had the unintended consequence of making it harder for couples on low to modest incomes to formalise their commitment through marriage, with all its benefits for adult and child well-being, the couple penalty was a bad thing and should be removed. However, at the beginning of the 2010 general election campaign, Mr Cameron explained that a fully transferable allowance could not be afforded immediately and that we would start with a provision allowing a non-earning spouse to transfer 11.6% of his or her allowance to an earner spouse. He added that he wanted the allowance to be increased and that he was sure that in the course of the Parliament it could be.

The marriage allowance was not actually introduced until the very end of the Parliament, in 2015, and then only as an even more meagre 10% allowance. It has continued to be just 10% ever since. At 10%, the marriage allowance is so small that it barely makes any impression on the couple penalty, which remains very considerable. In this context, we must assume that the couple penalty continues to act both as an obstacle to entering marriage and as a pressure for divorce.

As the Government have moved on to prioritising helping people to leave marriages with greater ease, there is now an urgent need for them to address the couple penalty problem in order both to remove an obstacle to marriage and to remove a strain on marriages that we must assume provides a fiscal incentive for divorce. If the Government want to get this Bill through, they would be well advised to use the Budget to significantly increase the marriage allowance in order to be seen to balance their efforts to help people to leave marriages more quickly with efforts to strengthen marriage.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, I put my name to the amendment of my noble friend Lord Farmer with the view that, if it is easy to produce those results, it might be quite wise to do so.

So far as the amendment of my noble friend Lord McColl of Dulwich is concerned, I noticed that he said that the Bill was intended to remove an obstacle to divorce, but I do not really think that that is a fair way to describe it. As far as I am concerned, the Bill deals principally with an unnecessary irritant to the relationship between divorcing parties. It does no good: it does not establish fault or anything of the kind; it just creates the possibility of renewed ill feeling as a result of a rehearsal of what one party to the marriage thinks about the other party. That is often not particularly flattering and certainly not particularly comforting, and removing it does not seem to remove an obstacle to divorce at all.