Given that the start of the year usually goes off at full speed, February can be the month where things plateau. You might grab a moment to ease off the accelerator to enjoy the delights of Pancake Day and see the New Year's resolve fade softly away as you stop going to the gym (guilty as charged...). However, on the Family Law frontier, the developments keep coming. This month we've seen updates to orders, new regulations and consultation papers - it's got some meat on its bones, so this month is Fleshy February.
Hungry for more
In January, the President announced there would be
updates to the private law orders, as those produced in conjunction with the Child Arrangements Programme were not thought to be making life easier (as was the intention) for Litigants in Person. With the help of
AdviceNow, the new drafts were made simpler and more concise, and these were circulated in a Judicial Template for judges and justices' legal advisers and also in tick box form for everyone else to use.
The orders come in three sections: allocation and gatekeeping, case management directions, section 8 and other orders, and finally enforcement. Since this announcement there have been two sets of amends to the forms the first of which tackled minor amends and produced Welsh versions to accommodate the differences in relation to activity directions: the most recent correcting a reference to jurisdiction. All the latest developments and the forms can be found
here.
CPD starved
The
Family Law Updates have been in full swing this month, but there are still a few remaining sessions left to go in Manchester, London and Exeter.
The updates are delivered by three expert speakers in each location (including a judge, a finance specialist and a children specialist), who take us through the key practice areas plus the latest on financial remedies, public and private children law and all things procedural, as well as a range of need-to-know hot topics.
There is also the ever popular
Pensions on Divorce seminar, which couldn't be timelier with all the forthcoming pension changes in April.
If you can't make it, keep an eye out for helpful tips from each event by following
@JordansFamLaw on Twitter and using #famlawupdate.
Sharing platter
With cohabitation becoming the fastest-growing relationship type in the UK, the Commons Library has published a
briefing paper providing general information about the number of cohabiting couples, how the law applies to cohabitants and the Law Commission's proposals for reform.
The Law Commission recommended the introduction of a new statutory scheme of financial relief on separation, based on the contributions made to the relationship by the parties. The recommendations have yet to be taken forward. The paper sets out information about how the law affects cohabiting couples on a range of issues including their property rights, housing, domestic violence, inheritance, pensions and parental responsibility. It also addresses the myth of the common law marriage.
The recent
successful court application of Joy Williams, who faced losing her home after her long-term partner died, leaving his estranged wife to claim a half-share of her house, highlights the difficulties cohabitants can find themselves in. For further discussion on inheritance rights for cohabitants, see
here.
Hard to digest
Minister for the Courts and Legal Aid, Shailesh Vara, announced on 11 February that, in accordance with its commitment to modernising the delivery of justice, the government would be
closing 86 of the originally proposed 91 courts. On average these 86 courts are reported to be used less than 2 days a week, and it was maintained that over 97% of citizens would still be able to reach their required court within an hour by car.
Accepting the court closures were difficult decisions; Mr Vara said:
'Changes to the estate are vital if we are to modernise a system which everybody accepts is unwieldy, inefficient, slow, expensive to maintain and unduly bureaucratic.'
