Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2020-06-17
Topic: Civil Rights
David Anthony Andrew Amess (Conservative, Centre-right): I rise to speak in support of amendment 1 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), and in so doing I take this opportunity to praise her, particularly for all the work that she does in this and so many other areas, and our former colleague, David Burrowes, who also has done a huge amount of work on this issue. Amendment 1 would increase the minimal legal time period for divorce to 12 months, instead of the six months proposed in the Bill, and it is both necessary and sensible. I toyed with thinking that I would not speak in this debate, because it would be a waste of time. I have been a Member of Parliament for a little while, and I have been a member of my party for more than 50 years, and when I first joined, the view that I have was the majority view. As each Parliament has gone by, I have seen some slippage, certainly among my colleagues, but I am delighted to be speaking now, because I have heard a number of speeches that I have been particularly encouraged by, including from a new colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton). What a joy it was to hear my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) speak. My goodness am I glad that I supported her in her first attempt to become leader of my party. She addressed a whole range of issues in a succinct way, and I entirely agreed with everything she said This is not a debate about whether it is right that people live together and do not get married; it is not that sort of debate. It is a debate about marriage itself. Marriage is very popular in the Amess household at the moment. Last year, one of my daughters got married in America. It was one of these new-style weddings, where it is an open venue. Next week, I have another daughter in America who is getting married. My wife and I cannot be there, and it is saving us a huge amount of money. Next year, we will have another wedding here, which will be slightly over the top. Another daughter was due to get married this year in August, but as with many other colleagues, that wedding cannot go ahead and will be taking place next year I have many constituents who have been married for 70 years, and I say to them, "Aren’t you sick of each other?" They say, "No, we still love each other just as much as when we first got married." I can hear my own father being asked whether he had ever had a row with my mother. He would say, "Only once, and that row hasn’t finished yet." In my own household, my wife and I never row, because she is right about everything. Well, I give her the impression, anyway, that she is right about everything I say to my hon. Friend the Minister—I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous)—that I and other colleagues are delighted to see him as a Minister, but, as my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire said earlier, the Bill seems to treat this as a legal matter, and the emotional side just is not there at all When the House debates anything that can slightly be termed "moral", the general public are not enamoured by that, because we as a class of politicians are seen as big-time sinners who should not have a view. I so agreed with what my right hon. Friend said, having represented first the constituency of Basildon, which in those days had the highest number of single parents in the country, and now Southend West. So many of us in our surgeries can see the impact of divorce at a practical level, and it seems crazy that we have people planning for their marriage for a year, two years or three years and it can now end in six months. That is quite extraordinary On Second Reading, the Secretary of State said that under the new law, "the legal process of divorce will take longer for about four fifths—80%—of couples".—[Official Report, 8 June 2020; Vol. 677, c. 104.] There is a crucial caveat in that sentence that the House must be aware of, namely that the Secretary of State is talking about the legal process of divorce—that is only the time from the first application to the final decree. The problem with that analysis is that it does not take into account that the proposals in the Bill operate in a fundamentally different way from the current law In the current system the period of two years’ separation with or without fault or five years’ living apart comes before the legal process of divorce, and that accounts for about 40% of divorces. In the proposed system, the period of separation starts after the legal process has begun, so it is disingenuous to compare the length of legal divorce proceedings under the Bill and under the current law That is comparing the Pope with Donald Trump, frankly. It is simply not defensible to say that 80% of divorces would take longer under a six-month separation period, when 40% of divorces currently take more than two years.