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 means test. It sounds like a technical matter for policy people. For the couples who sit across the table from us in Saffron Walden, it is the difference between getting proper advice and guessing.
The means test is what decides whether the state helps with your legal costs. It has not been updated since 2009. Rents have changed since then, and so have food bills, energy, childcare and the value of the house you are now trying to divide fairly. The Law Society points out that the share of the population eligible for legal aid has fallen from around half in 2000 to roughly one in five by 2022, and that full support now reaches only those already living well below the minimum income standard.
Two figures from that briefing stayed with me. The number of people representing themselves in the family courts has more than tripled since 2013. And referrals to legal aid funded mediation in family disputes have fallen by 61 per cent.
Why the second figure is the one that worries me
The first number tells you that people are going to court without help. The second tells you that far fewer of them are being pointed towards the calmer option before they get there. Mediation did not become more expensive over that period. The route into it simply became narrower, because the solicitors who used to make those referrals are no longer funded to see those clients at all.
That matters because the order in which you do things shapes everything that follows. A couple who talk first, with someone in the room whose only job is to keep the conversation useful, usually arrive at an agreement they both recognise as theirs. A couple whose first move is a court application often spend a year and a good deal of money reaching somewhere similar, with considerably more damage done along the way.
Legal aid for mediation has not disappeared
This is the part that gets lost in the headlines, so it is worth saying plainly. Family mediation is one of the few areas where legal aid is still available, and that assessment is separate from the one governing help with court proceedings. A frozen means test for litigation does not automatically shut the door on mediation.
If you qualify, mediation is free. And if only one of you qualifies, the Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting and the first full session of mediation are covered for both of you. That is a genuinely useful feature of the rules: one person being eligible gets both people through the door and into the first real conversation. It is worth checking rather than assuming, and we can usually tell you within a phone call whether it applies. You can read how the whole process works on our mediation page.
The voucher scheme sits alongside it, and it is not means tested
Separate from legal aid, the government family mediation voucher scheme contributes up to 500 pounds towards the cost of mediation. A few details are worth knowing before you dismiss it:
- It is not means tested, so your income does not decide whether you can use it.
- It covers disputes about children, and financial matters where child arrangements are also under discussion.
- A family can claim it once, so it pays to use it at the point where it will do the most work rather than on the first phone call.
- Only mediators authorised by the Family Mediation Council can claim it, and your mediator handles that paperwork rather than you.
Between the voucher and, where it applies, legal aid for mediation, a good number of separating couples find the first stage costs them very little indeed. Our prices page sets out plainly what happens after that, with nothing hidden in the small print.
If money is the thing you are actually arguing about
There is an uncomfortable circularity in all this. The people most affected by a frozen means test are the ones with the least room to absorb legal costs, and they are very often the same people whose separation is mainly a financial problem: one modest house, a pension nobody has looked at properly, and two households now to be funded from an income that used to run one.
Court is a poor tool for that particular problem. It is slow, it is expensive, and the outcome is imposed rather than agreed. Mediation lets you put the actual numbers on the table and make the trade-offs yourselves, which is usually where the creative solutions come from. Sometimes the honest answer is that there is not enough to go round, and it helps enormously if you both hear that from the same set of figures rather than from two sets of solicitors.
A smaller first step than you think
If you have read the news this week and concluded that help is not available to people like you, please test that before you accept it. A Mediation Information and Assessment Meeting is one conversation. You come on your own, you find out where you stand, and you leave knowing what the realistic options are and roughly what each one costs. Nothing is decided and nothing is binding.
Our frequently asked questions cover most of the practical things people are too polite to ask the first time. If yours is not there, do ring us and ask it.
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