The Ministry of Justice consultation A fairer end to relationships closes at 11:59pm on Friday 14 August 2026, and it proposes the biggest rewrite of financial provision at the end of relationships in half a century: codified financial remedies law on divorce, binding qualifying nuptial agreements, and statutory rights for cohabitants on both separation and death.
The consultation opened on 5 June 2026 and carries a foreword from David Lammy as Deputy Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor. It brings together three areas the Law Commission has examined separately over two decades, from the 2007 cohabitation report through the 2014 work on nuptial agreements to the December 2024 scoping report on financial remedies, and asks whether they should now be reformed as a single coherent framework. Family teams that have not yet responded have until the end of the week.
What does the consultation propose?
Part 1 adopts the Law Commission’s “codification-plus” model for financial remedies on divorce and dissolution. The settled principles of sharing and needs would move from case law into statute, with an overarching objective of achieving a fair outcome through their application, and the court would start from equal division of matrimonial property unless departure is required to meet needs. The definitions of matrimonial and non-matrimonial property would be codified in line with the Supreme Court’s decision in Standish v Standish, including the concept of matrimonialisation, so the treatment of pre-marital assets, inheritances and gifts would for the first time be a matter of statutory construction rather than authority-hunting.
Compensation does not survive as a codified core principle. The Government agrees with the Law Commission that it lacks a settled definition, and proposes instead a new factor in the statutory checklist requiring the court to take account of economic disadvantage suffered during the marriage, which is a quieter home for the same idea. Seamless pre-marital cohabitation counting towards the length of the marriage would also be codified, with a non-exhaustive list of factors drawn from the 2007 report and Kimber v Kimber.
The scale of what is at stake is not small. There were 103,816 divorces and dissolutions in England and Wales in 2023, and around 50,000 financial remedy applications were made to the court in 2025, every one of them currently resolved under a discretionary framework that the Law Commission warned may be inconsistent with the rule of law for want of certainty and accessibility.
Qualifying nuptial agreements arrive with safeguards
The consultation confirms that the Government plans to legislate for qualifying nuptial agreements, twelve years after the Law Commission recommended them and published a draft Bill. A QNA would be enforceable as a contract and would displace the court’s discretion, subject to safeguards: a valid contract executed as a deed, made no later than 28 days before the wedding, with material financial disclosure and independent legal advice for each party, neither of which can be waived.
The limit on party autonomy is needs. A QNA could not be used to contract out of meeting needs, but the consultation proposes that needs in this context be assessed on the narrower basis planned for cohabitants, excluding discretionary needs, which is a materially tighter test than the one the court currently applies when weighing an agreement under Radmacher v Granatino. Children’s needs could not be excluded at all. If this reaches statute, precedent banks, drafting practice and pre-marital advice all change, and the 28-day rule alone will reshape how late in an engagement firms are willing to take instructions.
What would cohabitants get on separation?
Part 2 proposes an entirely new statutory scheme, and it is here that a new practice area would be born. Around 3.5 million couples live together without marrying, more than double the figure of thirty years ago, 51% of babies were born to unmarried parents in 2022, and 47% of people still believe the common law marriage myth, yet a separating cohabitant today is confined to TOLATA 1996 trust claims and Schedule 1 to the Children Act 1989, of which just 285 applications were made in 2022 against 119,700 child maintenance applications.
The proposed framework would apply automatically to couples in committed, romantic, interdependent relationships who have lived together for three years, or who live together and share a child, with an opt-out available where both agree. The starting point would be legal ownership rather than sharing: each person keeps what they own, and the court departs from that only to meet needs assessed more narrowly than on divorce, with no discretionary element, children’s welfare first, a strong emphasis on the clean break, and maintenance confined to exceptional and time-bound circumstances such as long-term ill health. Cohabitants could never do better than spouses in comparable circumstances.
The consultation also asks, for both divorce and the new cohabitation scheme, whether domestic abuse including economic abuse should be more readily taken into account in the division of assets, and invites views on replacing the “gasp factor” formulation of the conduct threshold, which the Government describes as trivialising abuse.
Intestacy and the 1975 Act
Part 3 would give qualifying cohabitants automatic inheritance rights on intestacy for the first time, subject to a definition and minimum duration period, and would align their entitlement to administer a deceased partner’s estate with those new rights. The qualifying period for a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 would be removed altogether where the surviving partner and the deceased had children together. Private client teams should read this part alongside Part 2, because the same eligibility concepts are intended to run through both.
What should family teams do before Friday?
Respond, first of all: the questionnaire runs to well over forty questions and can be answered through the MoJ’s Citizen Space portal until 11:59pm on 14 August. The full consultation document repays reading as a whole, since the Government has designed the three parts to operate together and says so expressly.
Beyond the deadline, the practical signals are worth logging now. The proposed statutory duty on the court to consider pensions accrued during the marriage points to more pension sharing orders and more actuarial input in ordinary cases, a shift the recent Court of Appeal decision in Culligan on Wells sharing already gestures towards, and one that will matter most where the assets are hard to divide, as our guide to illiquid assets in financial remedy cases sets out. The consultation sits within the same reform programme as the weddings law consultation, and responses will feed legislation “when parliamentary time allows”, so nothing here changes advice this year. What changes now is the horizon against which long-running matters, nuptial agreements and cohabitation advice are planned.
The consultation closes at 11:59pm on 14 August 2026. If codification-plus and qualifying nuptial agreements reach statute, financial remedy advice, precedent banks and pre-marital planning all change, and the cohabitant provision scheme would create an entirely new practice area for family teams, with a three-year eligibility threshold and a needs test narrower than divorce.