More separating couples are arriving at their first meeting with a settlement already worked out by a chatbot. If that sounds like you, you are in very good company. Over the past year, UK searches for "best AI relationship advice" have risen by more than 550 per...

Families in England and Wales are being started later and kept smaller, and that quietly changes what separation looks like when it comes. On 21 September the Office for National Statistics published its birth figures for 2025. There were 585,396 live births in...

The help that used to be there has quietly moved out of reach for most separating families. On 8 October the Law Society asked the government to finally deliver a reform that has been promised, consulted on and then postponed for years: an overhaul of the legal aid...

When the country’s highest court stopped to listen to a fourteen year old, it reminded the rest of us of something that is easy to forget in the middle of a separation. On 17 September the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in the Petition of DM, a case about two...

If one home allows TikTok and the other does not, March 2027 is about to settle that argument for you. Last week the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, confirmed that the ban on social media accounts for under-16s will come into force in March 2027. Platforms including...

The Headline That Struck a Chord Recent BBC news highlighting a woman facing a staggering £105,000 legal bill to divorce her abusive husband has sent ripples of anxiety through many couples considering separation. It is a terrifying figure that brings the extreme...

If your financial order mentions school fees but was written before January 2025, it almost certainly says nothing about VAT, and that gap is now landing on someone's bank statement. Last week a barrister who acted in the Court of Appeal case on school fees orders...

If you have ever wondered whether it would be worth paying a little extra simply to get an answer sooner, new research suggests a great many people feel exactly the same. Research published on 18 September by the law firm Mills & Reeve found that 38.9 per cent of...

If you have quietly typed your situation into a chatbot at eleven o'clock at night, you are in far more company than you might think. New research published on 17 September by the legal reform charity Justice found that one in six people involved in a legal dispute...

The immediate focus versus long-term security When couples separate, it is entirely natural for conversations to centre around the immediate, tangible aspects of daily life. Where will we live? Who will stay in the house? How will we manage the mortgage? However, a...

As the days draw in and the autumn chill sets in across Essex and Cambridgeshire, many households are feeling an all-too-familiar pressure on their finances. Between rising domestic energy bills, the sharp expense of new school uniforms, and the recurring costs of...