Twenty-four may be a big number

Rhys Taylor has recently published Another Witches’ Brew   his definitive paper on pensions and divorce. Many compliments can be paid including the apparently oxymoronic comment that it is 76 pages long and concise. It is certainly the product of many hours of productive work.

Things were very different in years gone by the days when the senior practitioners such as the late Jeremy Tatham referred to the 1973 Act as the ‘new law’. Sometime in the 1980’s I did an ancillary relief case in the Bath County Court where the husband was a full time GP and my client the wife was a part-time GP. The papers included a statement of the husband’s pension rights obtained as was customary at the time to assess the loss of the widow’s pension. Despite that the NHS form also gave the transfer value of the husband’s fund. If I remember rightly it was about the same figure as the equity in the FMH and much larger than the wife’s fund. I argued that this might have some bearing on whether the husband’s interest in...

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