ABSTRACT
It was clear from the debates that there was cross party support for marriage guidance. There is an Inter Departmental Working Party on Family and Marriage which has issued a consultation paper seeking ideas as to how early intervention to support marriage and the family can be achieved, and the Lord Chancellor’s Department Minister in the Commons has promised that this will be his highest priority in seeking to head off family and marriage breakdown.The Parliamentary debates emphasised the importance of counselling before a marriage reached crisis point and while the Act does contain in s 22 a power for the Lord Chancellor to fund marriage support services in general terms (although he has to have Treasury permission to do so!) it is s 23 which impacts upon the new system by providing that the Legal Aid Board may fund marriage guidance (although not at the same time as funding representation) to those persons who would qualify for legal aid, and provided that the marriage counsellor believes that it would be suitable to the particular case.While early prevention may have a role to play in the better management of marriage breakdown, it is obviously this latter role for marriage guidance at a time when the marriage is already in crisis, and when a decision must be made as to whether it can be saved, which will be most crucial to practitioners. Indeed, in the House of Commons Sir Edward Heath drew attention to the important distinction between dealing with the problem of the incidence of broken marriages and dealing with the consequences. He took the view that preventing a high incidence of marriage breakdown was the responsibility of the church and educational and social organisations, who could help people to realise what the requirements of marriage are. He emphatically rejected any idea that marriage should be made more difficult either to contract or to dissolve, despite evidence that several North American States which had gone over to consensual divorce now wanted to revert to fault based divorce, commenting that while there were probably still many things for us to learn from the Americans he did not think that morality was one of them! (Weekly Hansard Issue No 1722, p 444 et seq.)
Thus marriage guidance will now obviously play a leading part in the new divorce process and the limitation by mutual exclusion of legally aided marriage guidance and representation at the same time may have crucial consequences for practitioners advising clients, particularly as in the House of Lords Lord Irvine made the point that representation is still important despite the tribute which must be paid to other skills to be introduced into the new system, although he was not at that point actually thinking of marriage guidance counsellors but of mediators: Hansard vol 567 p 716.
