Getting a divorce is not like getting a TV licence

Newspapers have recently announced that there has been a divorce revolution. From now on, getting a divorce will be as easy as getting a TV licence. Divorce will no longer take place in Family Courts and instead will be dealt with in specialised divorce centres, which will allow divorces to proceed much more swiftly, sometimes in the space of single day, now that the troublesome lawyers what been removed from the equation.

The eye catching quote that it will be simple as getting a TV licence had led to the usual howls of outrage from ill-informed politicians, such as Anne Widdecombe, who claims that it all undermines marriage.

These reports are so spectacularly inaccurate that I hardly know where to begin.

The divorce laws have not changed. To get a divorce you still need to be able to show that your marriage has irretrievably broken down due to adultery, or unreasonable behaviour, or desertion, or two years’ separation (with your spouse’s consent to a divorce), or five years’ separation (if your spouse won’t consent).

The only changes are administrative, not legal. In future, divorces will only be commenced at a small number of specialist divorce centres, rather than in any old Family Court. The divorce centre for the south-east of England (including London) is at the Family Court at Bury St Edmunds; it is still a court.

The divorce will also be granted by a lawyer. The work has been taken away from District Judges, as it was felt to be a waste of their valuable time, and the work will be handled instead by Legal Advisers (which is the modern and rather ghastly bureaucratic name for what used to be called magistrates court clerks). They are trained and experienced lawyers, and not mere administrative workers. Solicitors will still be used by many divorcing parties, even if many people will choose to represent themselves.

It certainly won’t be any faster. The Family Court estimates that in the divorce centres, a divorce will take an average of 33 weeks. Some people suggest that this will be faster than the Family Courts (and before April 2014, the County Courts) have managed; I don’t agree. The Family Court/County Court used to take between 4 and 6 months (i.e up to 26 weeks) to complete a divorce, where there weren’t any financial issues to slow matters down).

The new divorce centres certainly are not showing any signs so far of being faster than the Family Courts were; I recently received a certificate of entitlement to a divorce, notifying me that the Decree Nisi would be pronounced 6 weeks later. Quite why it has to wait for 6 weeks is unclear, given that the rules say that it should be listed on the first available date and in the past a couple of weeks was the norm. The certificate says that the Decree Nisi would be pronounced at 10.05 am, a surprisingly precise time. The old procedure in my local Family Court was to list all the Decree Nisis to be pronounced at 10 am; once upon a time the judge would put on his wig and gown and read out a list of names to a court room, empty other than for a reporter from the local paper. In recent years, all the court has done is post a notice on the board at the court with all the names on it, and that has been deemed sufficient; non-one ever attends the pronouncements.

Listing a Decree Nisi at 10.05 am suggests to me that the divorce centre has also listed one at 10 am, one at 10.10 am, one at 10.15 am and so on…I suspected that the Legal Advisers might adopt a very by the book approach and this may be what is happening. It might also explain why it is being claimed that 40% of the divorce petitions are being rejected at the issue stage, a statistic which I found astonishing given that it is a very rare occurrence indeed for one of my petitions to be rejected at any stage.

As for the suggestion that a divorce can competed in a single day, that is sheer fantasy without any basis whatsoever.

27th June 2015

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