Divorce & House Ownership Kendal

By  Supernanny Team 12/06/2007

The average price of a house is currently £175,000, a one-bed flat, £115,000. So even if you and your partner sell your house and each buy the cheapest alternative, the pair of you would be an average £55,000 adrift.

Plus, of course, there'd be two lots of council tax, utility bills, repairs etc. And it's a similar story with renting: two flats cost more than one small house. Which all means you are both going to be poorer – and a pre-nuptial contract is unlikely to help: British judges are not bound by them. Nor, legally, do we have any such thing as a common-law wife – so unmarried partners, beware. There’s normally no obligation for your ex-lover to maintain you from now on.

It’s tough for unmarried co-habitees: if you buy out your ex-partner's share of the home, the transaction will be treated as a new purchase and you'll be charged Stamp Duty. Divorcing married couples, though, don't incur this duty – it's treated as part of their divorce settlement. However, whether married or not, when there are children involved, the split is rarely straight down the middle. The law in Britain puts the children's interests first, the courts aiming to ensure that the kids maintain their previous standard of living and hopefully remain in the existing home, at the same school with the same friends.

This usually means that the family home (or a feasible alternative) will be allotted to the parent with whom the children are going to live, regardless of whose name is on the deeds or tenancy agreement and in spite of the fact that this parent may have temporarily moved out when the relationship broke down. With young children, this carer will nearly always be the mother. Generally speaking, only if she doesn't want care and custody or she's a patently bad mother, will Dad get the kids.

There is no longer a “guilty party” in a divorce. The fact that the wife may have slept with half her husband's friends and used his credit card to fund her adulterous hotel bills may make her a bad wife but not, in the courts' view, a bad mother. Blameless or not, both parents have equal financial responsibility for their children – and that's still true even if one partner has no access to the children and/or doesn't even want a divorce.

Frequently, therefore, the father will find himself banished to a poky studio flat, while his wife – and possibly even her lover – lives with his children in the house he paid for. And he will have to cough up maintenance for the children until they reach 17 (or 19 if in full-time education). Only at that far-off stage – providing this was written into the divorce settlement – will the matrimonial property be sold and the proceeds divided between him and his former wife.

So who decides who pays what? Ideally, the divorcees themselves. And once the two of you have come to a conclusion as to what’s fair – for example, Dad pays the mortgage and utility bills; Mum pays for food, clothes and hol...

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