Supreme Court justice criticises Lords over plans to make wives ‘stand on their own two feet’ after divorce

Plans in the House of Lords to make ex-wives “stand on their own two feet” by prohibiting the transfer of any non-matrimonial property upon divorce have been criticised by a Supreme Court justice who said “well-meaning” peers too readily believe what they “read in the papers”.

In a lecture to students at Bristol University, Lord Wilson said that peers make the mistake of treating “exceptional” cases as the norm, causing them to “exaggerate the difficulties of our current system and to ignore the virtue of principles which have a sufficient degree of elasticity to enable a reasonable result to be fitted to each case”.

In his own judgments, Lord Wilson said he has actually sought to limit the sharing principle to matrimonial property and suggested that transfer of non-matrimonial property be made on the basis of need: “…if, for example, a husband brings a mass of property into a long marriage, but if no further property is accumulated during it, the wife at the end of it still, for example, needs a home”.

He added that, were some of the clauses of the Divorce (Financial Provision) Bill applied to past cases, the consequences would be “grotesque”.

Lord Wilson also addressed the “running sore” issue of periodical payments made by a husband to a wife for years following divorce.

He said: “I well understand that it is a running sore for husbands to have to continue payments long after the divorce; and my experience is that their new wives are often even angrier about it than they are! The obligation can eat into their married life in more ways than one. The trouble is that it is usually unrealistic to tell a wife, left on her own perhaps at age 60 after a long marriage, that, following payments for say three years, she must fend for herself. So we judges have to strike a difficult balance.”

And he criticised one peer who in his view “betrayed a lack of insight” when they accused justices of being motivated by “antiquated notions of chivalry”.