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8.45 pm
Sir Jerry Wiggin (Weston-super-Mare): I got divorced--I use the phrase deliberately, as I did not want to be divorced and I do not believe that there was a reason for the divorce, but I shall not trouble the House with the
details of my personal affairs. I strongly disagree with the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr. Tipping), who said that our personal experiences should not influence our attitudes to social legislation. In my view, it is our personal experiences which drive us and give this House its life.
As a result of my experience, I am infinitely more pro-family and pro-marriage. Being deprived of something makes one realise its value. I was very shaken and upset by my experience, which was the worst of my life and one that I would not wish on my worst enemy. One thing that I learned was that all divorces are different. There seems to have been a steady assumption in the commentaries on the Bill that divorce is always a matter of men going off with bimbos and leaving their wives and children behind. Yet many divorces are similar to mine, instigated by the woman, who either gets bored--there was no third party in my case--or decides that she wants to change her life. Such women then seek legal advice.
The solicitors who live by divorce fall into two distinct camps. There are those who try to make it as easy, cheap and gentle as possible, and there are those who deliberately exacerbate divisions between the partners and are quite willing to run up high costs. I am afraid there are far too many of the latter sort.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence) made an excellent assessment of the situation, which I fear has not been appreciated by many of my right hon. and hon. Friends who have spoken against the Bill. The fact is that no fault or bad conduct is taken into account at present, even though that may not be what the law says. I acknowledge the long experience of my hon. Friend the Member for Teignbridge (Mr. Nicholls) as a divorce lawyer. He made it clear that "unreasonable behaviour" may amount to no more than a couple of rows undergone in the previous four years.
I was advised that I could go to court and have my case heard before a judge, and it would last two or three days and cost tens of thousands of pounds which I could ill afford. As I was a Minister at the time, my name would have been spread across the papers and my children would have read about the family divisions. It was simply not a common-sense option; anyone serious about arriving at a practical resolution as easily as possible would not entertain it. One party is forced to submit; one partner can do that to the other without any difficulty.
Not much has been said about the division of money in today's debate--the Bill is not primarily about that--but that is what causes so much concern. Once the lawyers decide that there is effectively no blame in a divorce, the objective with regard to the family's funds should be to leave the two parties as near as possible to their financial situation before the split. That objective is fine for millionaires, but it is a farce for the rest of the population--97 per cent. of us--to attempt to split the family's funds so as to leave the situation as before.
The ping pong played with and by the lawyers--the allegations, the letters that have to be answered, the papers that have to be found and, all the while, the costs ticking up on a one-way ratchet--does nothing to calm people down or to persuade them to approach the situation with a gentle attitude. Misunderstanding and acrimony can become totally unbearable.
The Bill is a very well-intentioned attempt to solve a nigh-on insoluble problem. I support mediation. I hope that, as some hon. Members have mentioned, mediation
will sometimes even lead to reconciliation. When I saw Father Jack Dominian, a very well-known expert in these matters--he gave me time on a Sunday night, which was very good of him--he said:
She did not wish to go, and there was no compulsion on her to go, so no more came of it.
I support the one-year period. I believe that any longer period would be damaging. Some resolution of people's problems is perhaps better than allowing them to run on. The hon. Member for Bristol, East (Ms Corston) rightly mentioned in fulsome terms the Bristol Family Mediation Service, of which I am a patron. It wrote to me:
and, they might have added, for the parties as well.
I am concerned about the odd aberration: the person who discovers on honeymoon that there is no possible hope for a marriage to continue. I am familiar with a person who married a strange man who for many years had a mistress: he thought that marriage might be rather fun, so he married this person. There could be no future in such a marriage and since there were no children involved it was quickly ended. Under this Bill, there is no way in which there can be a rapid divorce. I hope that, perhaps in Committee, some thought might be given to them.
There is not one hon. Member who has not had his or her surgery filled with Child Support Agency cases. A part of those CSA cases is the physical distress of the parties. Those hon. Members who have never been involved in divorce personally have only to come in contact with it on that basis to recognise the great personal distress experienced by the parties.
I should like to add my voice to those asking that the mediation service should receive money. It is a very strange situation that we spend not millions but billions of pounds of public money dealing with the aftermath of divorce, supporting the lone women and men and dealing with all those tragedies. There must be a multiplier benefit if some of that money were to be hived off, in modest terms, for some assistance, even if the success rate was low.
I know that time is very short. Finally, therefore,I commend to the House the debate in the other place, which was of an extremely high order. The one comment that really caught my mind was that of the Chief Rabbi, who described marriage and divorce in the Jewish community and how the practice of divorce has--as in the case of every other religion--grown steadily in recent times. He asked why people did not divorce in earlier times. The answer was that it was because of the stigma: he repeated the word many times, and I think that we all know what he meant.
Mr. John Hutton (Barrow and Furness):
When the Law Commission first published its proposals for divorce law reform in 1990, one in three marriages ended in divorce. The figure now, sadly, is nearer to one in two. In 1993, there were nearly 160,000 divorces, which directly affected the lives of nearly 200,000 children under the age of 16.
Marriage breakdown, quite simply, despite all its traumas and financial hardship, is now an everyday event. Unlike some Conservative Members who have spoken in this debate, however, I do not think that those statistics can reasonably be attributed to legislation. Social and economic factors are much more important in determining the incidence of marital breakdown than is divorce legislation--which leads me to conclude that divorce legislation will never succeed in altering those basic social facts of life. Marriages will continue to break down whether we like it or not. That was certainly true of the time before the Divorce Reform Act 1969. Divorce was not invented in 1969. So although the law alone is unlikely directly to influence the rate of marital breakdown, it should not make matters worse than they already are and, wherever possible, it should make things better.
Two fundamental principles should guide the development of divorce and family law. First, we should try to save as many marriages as possible. That will require better access to well-resourced marriage guidance and reconciliation services. Divorce should not be the first option when a marriage gets into difficulty. Secondly, we should ensure that, when a marriage is not capable of being saved, it can be dissolved as quickly as possible, with a minimum of bitterness and distress.
Everyone knows that divorce is an ugly and painful business; it is probably the lowest point in a person's life. But it is absolutely right that we should look again at our current rules on divorce to ensure that couples who split up are able to leave their marriages with the least pain and in circumstances in which they are required to make proper provision for their finances and for the welfare of any children. That simply does not happen under the present rules. I believe that the Bill will improve the present procedures and should therefore be supported.
In particular, I welcome part I of the Bill, which comprises one clause setting out the general principles which are to guide the courts and the individuals responsible for discharging the legislation. I am in favour of such "general principle" clauses because they are of value to the courts, lawyers and others involved in divorce proceedings.
Many of the opponents of the Bill have concentrated on clauses 5 and 7 and the abolition of the fault principle. They have criticised the Bill for introducing what they see as divorce on demand after 12 months. This, they believe, will undermine the sanctity of marriage and damage society. I do not believe that that will be the case--in fact, quite the contrary. This is one of the rare occasions when there is probably more support for a Government Bill on the Opposition side of the House than on the Government side. That has been reflected in many of the speeches made by Conservative Members today. It is a sad reflection of the fact that some Conservative Members have fallen under the spell and influence of some pretty disreputable leading articles in The Daily Telegraph and
the Daily Mail, which have tried to characterise the Bill as striking a fundamental blow at the sanctity of marriage. That is rubbish, and I am glad that some Conservative Members support the Bill and have made their support public and obvious.
The fault principle contained in existing divorce law is used in nearly 75 per cent. of cases. Fault in the form of adultery or unreasonable behaviour is cited so often as the reason for marital breakdown precisely in order to obtain a quick divorce. The existing emphasis on fault in our divorce law has not resulted in fewer divorces taking place; nor has it acted as a buttress for the Judaeo-Christian moral norms to which the hon. Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) referred.
Many hon. Members referred to the Family Mediation Service. I shall read briefly from a letter that I received from the Cumbria Family Mediation Service on 19 March and which deals with the question of fault. Marcia Start, the administrator of the Cumbrian service, said:
That is the important point. If we can remove fault from the proceedings, we have a chance of ending up with a better result.
It is also worth reminding ourselves of what Mrs. Justice Booth argued in an article in The Guardian on 8 March. She said:
She then compiles a pretty dismal catalogue of deficiencies in the existing arrangements and concludes:
I agree with those comments.
I hope that, by removing the concept of blame from the divorce process, the Bill will create an opportunity for both parties to face up to their own responsibilities. This in turn can make the divorce process itself less acrimonious. That will be of obvious benefit to all the parties involved, especially the children. The combination of no fault and a cooling-off period is much more likely to protect the emotional interests of children caught up in the nightmare of divorce than a continuation of the present laws.
We have to be honest with ourselves and recognise that no law that we could devise will succeed in compelling people who do not want to live with each other to continue to live with each other. We simply do not live in that world any longer. We delude ourselves if we pretend that we can devise some legislative formula that will suddenly turn back the tide of divorce. We should be deluding ourselves if we thought that such a device existed or that we could create one. We cannot. If people no longer love each other and do not want to live with each other we cannot make them, and it would be foolish to try. We must be concerned to devise procedures and mechanisms that will allow the break to take place in the best possible circumstances.
Many of the organisations involved in family law have expressed their support for the abolition of the fault principle and the promotion of mediation services. That is the right way to proceed, but there must be greater emphasis in the Bill on marriage guidance and reconciliation. I have read the Bill quite carefully, and I do not think that the words "marriage guidance" appear in it at all--and they should. As we know, mediation and guidance are not the same.
"I can help you only if I can talk to your wife."
"For these reasons, we support the replacement of the fault clauses (as a means of establishing that the marriage has irretrievably broken down) by a period of reflection for a year. It is our experience that a year is about the right length of time. Any less does not give time for everything to be sorted out constructively; longer than a year is to prolong the period of uncertainty for the children"--
"It is our clients' experience that, if they have had to allege fault in order to get divorced more quickly than two years . . . this has added to the tension between them and has had effects on their children by making it difficult to maintain a secure atmosphere for them. The Bill cannot get rid of 'fault' and most divorcing parents blame one another. But it can remove the need to use fault as a means of establishing breakdown."
"In reality, the existence of fault in our present divorce law creates no obstacles to divorce: quite the reverse."
"The present law and procedures have evolved without any clear direction or consistent policy. They are manifestly unsatisfactory. The opportunity for reform should not be lost."
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