With the General Election looming on Thursday 8 June, here are the main three parties’ policies in relation to divorce and family law:
The Conservative Party
The Conservatives have regrettably not included anything in their manifesto about no-fault divorce. Given that this was once Conservative policy (admittedly that was back in 1996), it is disappointing that they have not proposed that our outdated fault-based divorce system should be replaced by a modern no-fault divorce. Progressive stuff like this does not tends to go down well with the party grassroots apparently, who prefer the views of people like Sir Edward Leigh and Anne Widdecombe who claim, without any real evidence to support their case, that no-fault divorce will increase the number of failed marriages. I have blogged extensively on this issue and why I think they are hopelessly wrong on this issue; my last blog on this can be found here. The party also didn’t like the idea of gay marriage much. It is to the credit of David Cameron that he introduced gay marriage and to the shame of many Conservatives that they didn’t. Theresa May appears to have learned the lesson from that fight and has overlooked the huge public support there is for no-fault divorce. A missed opportunity to do some real good.
On the plus side, they are committed to improving the domestic violence laws, including introducing a statutory definition of domestic abuse. There are a number of competing definitions at the moment, some of which go much further in defining abuse than others including some things that many people would be surprised to see classed as abuse. I suspect there will be cross-party support for this.
Unsurprisingly, there is nothing about better legal rights for cohabiting couples or mixed sex couples.
The Labour Party
Labour have announced that they will introduce no-fault divorce. (Actually, they say that they will introduce a no-fault divorce procedure, which is not the same thing at all, but presumably at some point they will realise that you need to change the actual law, not just the procedure). In the late 1990’s Tony Blair decided against implementation of the no-fault divorce laws contained in the Conservatives’ (admittedly poorly drafted) Family Law Act 1996. We were promised better no-fault divorce by Labour at the time, but nothing happened before they left office in 2010.
Strangely, there’s nothing in the manifesto about better legal rights for cohabiting couples which you would have thought would be a natural Labour policy. Again, Labour promised this in the past, and were planning to adopt the Law Commission’s recommendation for reform, before bottling out and saying they would wait and see how reforms in Scotland fared. The issue was then kicked into the long grass and not much has been heard of it since.
Labour are promising to bring back some kind of family legal aid. I understand that in the version of the manifesto that was leaked in advance, this was explicitly called Legal Aid, but the final official version changed the phraseology to “early advice entitlement” instead of family legal aid, which probably gives them some wriggle room. (To be fair, there is an explicit reference to other types of Legal Aid for non-family cases). The thing about Legal Aid is that, unlike public spending on hospitals and schools, it doesn’t have much appeal to voters (until they find that they cannot afford a solicitor). I suspect that given the other huge spending commitments in their manifesto, Legal Aid will get short shrift and Labour will fall back into politician’s lazy habit of portraying it as just funding fat cat lawyers.
There’s some sensible stuff about improving domestic abuse legislation, for which I again anticipate there would probably be cross-party support.
The Liberal Democrats
The Lib Dems strangely don’t say anything about no-fault divorce. You would have thought this would be their bag. They are in favour of greater rights for cohabiting couples and mixed sex civil partnerships. To read my blog about that last issue, click here.
The Lib Dems are also in favour of abolishing the spousal veto, something that I confess I have never heard of before – it’s something to do with gender recognition for transgender people and frankly made my head hurt when I tried to understand it. If you want to know more about that, click here. They will also get rid of any remaining marriage inequalities in areas such as pensions, hospital visitation rights, and custody of children in the event of bereavement.
If you want to read the manifestos for yourselves, they can be found here:
https://www.conservatives.com/manifesto
http://www.labour.org.uk/index.php/manifesto2017
http://www.libdems.org.uk/manifesto
I doubt that many people will make their decisions about who to vote for purely on the basis of the parties’ policies on divorce and family law. (I’m very much in favour of no-fault divorce, for example, but there’s no way I’m voting for Labour for reasons that have nothing to do with the law). There are many bigger issues and when choosing a party, you probably should decide which parties’ policies overall you prefer.
3 June 2017