My Partner Isn’t Co-operating – What Can I Do? Enforcement in Financial Remedy Proceedings

There are various areas where you might need enforcement in family financial remedy proceedings. In this video Ursula Rice explores three examples: when you can’t agree on a letter of instruction to an expert; when the other person won’t file their Form E; and if they won’t sign the papers authorising the sale of the house.

No time to watch the video? Here’s the transcript:

Hello there, my name is Ursula Rice and I am a family solicitor at Family First Solicitors.

Today I’m going to talk to you about enforcement in family financial remedy proceedings. This is money that arises from divorce.

So, you get divorced and you have financial remedy proceedings going on, and there are things going wrong and one person is not being co-operative. What do you do to make something happen that has already been ordered by a judge?

Here are some of enforcement actions I could imagine you needing to take:

Firstly, you may have a joint letter of instruction in order to instruct an expert that needs to be agreed, and people can’t get to an agreement about what goes in the letter. That is something you would submit to the court, not strictly for enforcement, but for a determination after you’ve already had an order about the sort of big picture side of it.

Secondly, somebody won’t file their form E. Now, that is a sort of enforcement where you would have something called a penal notice, and I will come back to that in a minute.

Thirdly, what about if you get all the way to the end of your case and someone just simply won’t sign the papers to get the house sold? And there’s an order that says the house is going to be sold and you can’t have your money till it’s sold. What a nightmare.

And that is strictly enforcement.

So in the first case, which is really asking the court to determine the detail, my advice would be is that you agree with the other side that “this is what I say about the joint letter of instruction and this is what you say about the joint letter of instruction. Let’s submit both to the judge for the judge to decide which version should go to the expert”.

Now, that is likely to be something that you would agree to share the cost of, because you simply can’t agree. And it’s probable that you didn’t canvass the exact ins and outs of it in the hearing beforehand. And actually, you should have done that. You didn’t. So it’s both of your bad, OK?

The second scenario, a Form E, for example, is not being filed with all the appropriate documents. This is a really important document. It should be filed. You can’t process through the financial remedy proceedings unless you’ve got one. In that case, what I would do is I would, on a D-Eleven form, ask the court for a penal, P-E-N-A-L, notice to be attached to the paragraph number of the order that says and you will file Form E. You must also ask for your costs because that way you get seven pounds fifty an hour if you’re in person or the cost of your lawyer in doing this. And the court is, in my experience, they will simply grant your penal notice. The penal notice will say if you, the naughty person, does not file the Form E in fourteen days, then we’ll be having a contempt of court hearing. which could mean a fine, could mean prison. It’s pretty serious and it gets people moving like you wouldn’t believe.

Third scenario, enforcement over a final order that somebody is simply refusing to comply with. You have a number of options, but what you want to do is make an application for enforcement on a D-Eleven. And perhaps what you might say is, “I’m going to ask the judge to simply sign the papers to give me sole conduct of the sale” because he won’t even cooperate with the estate agents and I want my costs of doing so.

The other route you could go down is something called contempt of court, because you can simply say this person is in breach of an order. That’s contempt of court. I want him punished. That’s not the same as getting all those powers of sole conduct. A judge will sign on your behalf. So it’s not quite the same thing, but it’s pretty scary.

It is much more difficult, however, to get contempt of court proceedings. And I would leave those right down the line, because if you’re going towards a contempt of court situation, It’s usually pretty heavy and things have got pretty serious.

Of course, if you need any help with any advice about this, we’re more than happy to advise. Your first meeting costs £180, takes as long as it takes. And yes, we do deal with enforcement. I hope that’s been of use. Remember to like or subscribe to our YouTube channel and to get more family law tips.