Sleepy Suffolk town Bury St Edmunds may soon become the centre for divorces taking place in London and the South East. Kind of.
The Ministry of Justice is changing arrangements for divorces so that in future divorce proceedings may only be issued in a small number of divorce centres, rather than in your nearest or most convenient Family Court. It has been claimed that this is a response to the bizarre case where 180 divorces were recently set aside as being fraudulent, although in truth it has more to do with efficiently using court resources and saving money. I doubt that the changes being planned would prevent a similar fraud; I have a sinking feeling that the court will decide that it must start demanding that our clients prove their identity to the court’s satisfaction before it will allow proceeding to be issued. (It may be too much to hope that the Court will be prepared to rely on solicitors having complied with their obligation under the Proceeds of Crime Act to “know their client” by checking their ID).
As the Family Court at Chelmsford is the designated family proceedings centre for Essex, I had assumed that once these changes are introduced, all new divorce proceedings would have to be issued there. However, following a Freedom of Information request, it has transpired that the MoJ is instead considering choosing Bury St Edmunds County and Family Court to handle all divorces, not just for Essex, but also for the whole of London and the South-East. The reason for this seems to be that there is spare capacity in Bury.
This does not mean that the small court building in Bury St Edmunds will suddenly be dealing with vast numbers of divorce financial disputes and cases about children. It would just handle the divorce, which is usually just a paper exercise and which I have heard rumoured may in future be handled by Legal Advisers (formerly known as Clerks to the Justices). If an application is made to the Family Court for a financial order or for a Child Arrangements Order, those cases will be heard in a Family Court elsewhere.
It does however raise the question about how urgent divorces will be issued. For example, if a wife needs to apply to the court for an order freezing the husband’s assets as he is about to hide them or dispose of them in order to prevent her claiming them in a divorce, she must at the same time apply to the court for a financial order. She can only do that if a divorce petition is also issued at the court. Logistically this will be difficult if the divorce proceedings have to be started in Bury St Edmunds, but the financial application and injunction application have to start in Chelmsford.
The changes brought about by the arrival of the Family Court in April 2014 keep coming.
17 January 2015