Anne Braithwaite, head of Family Partners, a specialist division of Lupton Fawcett LLP and a spokesperson for Leeds Legal, an alliance of the city’s major law firms,
explained the recession would currently be causing tensions between thousands of couples in the area over issues such as redundancies and business failures. She added that these would be placing relationships that were already rocky under potentially terminal strain.
She added, however: “Based on my experience of the last recession, in the early 1990s, many such couples will be holding off separating for now, as they can’t see a way of sorting out their finances, through selling a house or one of them remortgaging and buying the other out, for instance.
“These doubts are only exacerbated by many partners feeling insecure about their jobs or being worried that they are carrying high debt levels, for example, in the current economic climate.”
Miss Braithwaite, based at the firm’s offices in East Parade, Leeds, said if that downturn nearly 20 years ago was any guide, however, this situation would change before the current recession ended, as already shaky relationships finally gave way under financial pressure.
She said: “There may be a time lag between the monetary screw tightening significantly and a relationship hitting the rocks, but the fact is that a marriage which was unstable to begin with doesn’t survive events like a company going down or a personal insolvency very easily.
“One of the key differences from the last recession, though, is because of the greater depth of the current downturn, the number of cases arising eventually could well be even higher this time round.”
Miss Braithwaite said that one effect of the current economic climate was divorce lawyers having to be more creative, as they were often advising against a background of Individual Voluntary Arrangements, for example, and in a context where a house sale, even if agreed by both partners, so they could move on, may take years, because of the depressed property market.
She added the recession was also prompting other significant changes in her team’s workload, pointing to a “massive increase” in applications for variations in maintenance by former partners who had hit hard times during the downturn.
She added: “As many people are discovering, however, it is still a case of ‘for richer, for poorer’, even after a divorce, when maintenance is being paid!”
Miss Braithwaite said her team had even been consulted recently over a case where a divorce had been finalised many years ago, but the home was still in joint names, and the former husband who had originally left, leaving his ex-wife in occupation, had now lost his job and was threatening to move back in.
She said: “The answer is that he probably can’t, but the fact that he’s thinking about it is definitely a sign of the times.”
Leeds Legal is a unique organisation, dedicated to raising the profile of the world-class expertise of the city’s legal services sector – the largest in the UK outside London. It continues to be one of the most successful city agencies to utilise European and international trade missions.
