Family Law
No-fault divorce, child arrangements, child maintenance, domestic abuse, adoption, financial settlements, parental responsibility, and marriage rights under UK law.
Covered in this guide:
If you're going through a split or a dispute about kids, the Children Act 1989 puts the child's welfare first and runs on parental responsibility and child arrangements. England and Wales now use no-fault divorce under the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 — minimum 26 weeks. Money is settled under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, and you need a consent order to close financial claims. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 covers coercive control. Child maintenance runs through the CMS under the Child Support Act 1991. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate statutes.
Key Laws
Matrimonial Causes Act 1973
c. 18
Divorce grounds, financial settlements
Children Act 1989
c. 41
Child welfare, parental responsibility, care orders
Child Support Act 1991
c. 48
Child maintenance calculation and enforcement
Family Law Act 1996
c. 27
Non-molestation orders, occupation orders
Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020
c. 11
No-fault divorce
No-Fault Divorce
For decades, English divorce required someone to be the bad guy — adultery, unreasonable behaviour, desertion, or years of separation. Couples who simply wanted to part fabricated allegations to fit t...
Child Arrangements
The Children Act 1989 swept away the old combative vocabulary. There is no "custody"; there is no "access." What you have, when separated parents disagree about a child, is a Child...
Child Maintenance
The Child Maintenance Service replaced the discredited Child Support Agency in 2012, after years of complaints that the CSA was both heavy-handed and ineffective. The current system, set up under the...
Domestic Abuse Protection
For most of English legal history, "domestic abuse" meant a black eye. Everything else — the controlled spending, the monitored phone, the friends quietly cut off — went unprosecuted because...
Adoption Rights
Adoption permanently transfers parental responsibility from the birth parents to the adopters. Unlike most family court orders, an adoption order is irrevocable — once granted, the child is legally yo...
Financial Settlement on Divorce
The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 gives the family courts unusually wide discretion. Unlike most areas of law, there's no fixed formula — judges work through a statutory checklist (the section 25 factor...
Parental Responsibility
Parental responsibility (PR) is the technical term for the bundle of rights and duties a parent has in relation to a child — the legal authority to make the decisions that shape the child's life. The...
Marriage and Civil Partnership
Marriage law in England and Wales has changed more in the last twenty years than in the previous two centuries. Civil partnerships arrived in 2004, same-sex marriage in 2013, opposite-sex civil partne...