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04 August 2023 / David Burrows
Issue: 8036 / Categories: Features , Family , Divorce , Procedure & practice
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Couples' agreements: settlement matters

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In the first of a two-part series, David Burrows puts the case for pre-conditional order approval of financial settlements
  • Acts from 1969 and 1973 allow parties to divorce or dissolution proceedings to submit their agreement to the court for an opinion on the couple’s settlement.
  • The Family Procedure Rules Committee has done nothing to bring this into effect, and couples can find that, until they have a conditional order, their agreement can still be upset.

The mediation movement has been with us since the late 1970s. The Bristol Courts Family Conciliation Service, the first mediation service, opened its doors in 1979. Ten years before that, s 7 (in force from 1 January 1971) of the Divorce Reform Act 1969 (DRA 1969) came into operation. That s 7 is what is still in the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 (MCA 1973) and has its parallel in s 43 of the Civil Partnership Act 2004 (CPA 2004). Both sections give the Family Procedure Rules Committee (FPRC) power to allow parties to

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