Marriage And Money
A recent Court of Appeal decision Miller v Miller [2005] EWCA CIV 984 has considered in some detail the extent to which the conduct of the parties to a marriage and the duration of the marriage may have a bearing on any ultimate financial settlement on divorce.Mr. Miller, 41, married Mrs. Miller 36, in July 2000. Prior to the marriage, Mrs. Miller had earned an income of approximately £85,000 per annum and lived in rented accommodation. Mr. Miller, a successful Fund Manager, was earning an annual income in excess of £1m when the parties met. Mr. Miller bought a home prior to the marriage in London intended for the couple for £1.8m. Mrs. Miller gave up her employment in May 2001 and in summer 2001, the parties purchased a holiday home in France. The parties had no children. Mr. Miller began a relationship with another woman to whom he is now married and left the marriage in April 2003.
The Judge found that the marriage had lasted for 3 years.
The trial Judge, Mr. Justice Singer had awarded Mrs. Miller the sum of £2.3m for housing and a £2.7m lump sum calculated to give Mrs. Miller a life long annual income of £98,000 tax free. Lord Justice Thorpe did not interfere with that award. Effectively, he agreed that the trial Judge was “entitled to conclude that the husband was to blame for the breakdown of the marriage. That finding entitled him to give much less weight to the duration of the marriage than he would have done had he found that the wife was to blame for its breakdown or that the parties had separated consensually”.
He said that notwithstanding the length of the marriage, it had given the wife a reasonable expectation that her life as a single woman need not revert to what it was before her marriage.
The Court of Appeal said that an award which was simply aimed at getting the wife back on her feet or put her in the position that she would have been in but for the marriage was no longer the modern approach. Lord Justice Thorpe endorsed the principles laid down by the House of Lords in the landmark case of White v White [2000] 1 AC 596 which he said applied to short marriages as well as marriages of long duration.
The White v White case had ruled that only with good reason should the Courts discriminate financially between husband and wife and Lord Nicholls in that case had said that “if in their different spheres, each contributed equally to the family, then in principle it matters not which of them earned the money and built up the assets. There should be no bias in favour of the money earner and against the home maker and the child carer”.
Mr. Miller who in a recent Sunday Times article described himself as having been the victim of what he called “legally sanctioned burglary” is seeking to take his case to the House of Lords.
Brian Quinn