AMICO Library
The Divorce
The actual divorce aspect of any separation, whilst symbolic of the end of your marriage, is actually quite straightforward. Divorce proceedings are, on the whole, an uncontroversial paperwork exercise which runs in tandem with resolving your financial issues and any matters relating to your children.
Since April 2022 the divorce process has been significantly simplified. It is no longer necessary to attribute blame to one party to the marriage for citing a reason for the breakdown of your marriage such as adultery or unreasonable behaviour, nor is it necessary to wait two years for divorce. Whilst who divorced who on what ground barely ever had any impact on the rest of the case, the need to ‘blame’ a party used to cause a lot of un-necessary acrimony at the start of cases and is something that family lawyers campaigned to change for many years.
As a consequence of the divorce law reforms you can now proceed with a divorce, either jointly or by making a sole application relying on the fact of the irretrievable breakdown of your marriage.
HM Courts and Tribunals Service have an online portal through which you can issue the divorce petition and pay the court fee. Most clients, where there are not complications or connections to other countries, issue their own petitions without the involvement of solicitors to save legal costs.
The no fault based system does now have within it a 20 week ‘cooling off’ period so it can be worth issuing a divorce petition at an early stage to get this countdown underway.
After the 20 weeks have elapsed you can apply for your conditional order, previously known as a “Decree Nisi”.
Once the conditional order has been pronounced you can apply, six weeks and one day later for the final divorce order, which brings your marriage to an end. It is common to hold off applying for the financial order until the financial issues between you have been resolved.
At any point after the conditional order you can ask the court to approve a financial order which records any agreement that you have reached and dismisses, as appropriate, any financial claims that exist as a consequence of your marriage.
