Last year, Richard Bacon MP introduced a Bill to Parliament under the Ten Minute Rule that would have provided for the introduction of divorce without fault. The Bill did not get a second reading, but gave welcome oxygen to the campaign by our family lawyers’ association Resolution that the time has come to stop the mud-slinging inherent in our outdated divorce process. The House of Commons library has just published a very helpful briefing paper on the subject so that MPs who come to consider the issue again can be fully informed. When we family lawyers talk about ‘no fault…
Two news stories have hit our desks this week, which illustrate rather differing approaches to resolving the complex issues facing families today. The first story emanates from the Marriage Foundation, which is an organisation aiming to be a “national champion for marriage”. Its stated aims are to seek to influence the way individuals, couples and society as a whole think about forming, maintaining and ending relationships, and it promotes access to relationship support and education, and a better public understanding of the nature and benefits of marriage. Fundamentally, it is a pro-marriage lobbying organisation. The Foundation has been in the…
There’s a lot of discussion among family lawyers at the moment about “no fault divorce”, particularly Resolution’s campaign to enable people to divorce without delay and without alleging that the other person in the marriage has been at fault. We’ve alluded to this debate in a previous post and will return to it in more substance another time. To understand the current discussions we think it’s important to have an idea of the context for the changes now being demanded, and so we present CFLP’s “A Brief History of Divorce”. Way back in the days of yore, when the church was…
