Saturday, March 19, 2005

Unmarried Couples to get Divorce rights

I saw this article briefly the other day but it does not appear to have recieved much media attention. The Government is looking at ways of reforming the law so that unmarried couples have divorce style rights to the other person's property and even pension if they have lived together for more than two years and then split up.

Apparently the argument is that most people don't know they have no rights. This is a very weak argument to me as the way to overcome this is surely to communicate this weakness rather than legislate.

The only winners as far as I can see will be the cabal of lawyers. Many people surely resist getting married due to the arcane divorce laws in this country. For example, all pre-marriage assets and savings are shared equally on divorce rather than returned to the original owner.

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