Three years ago, there was a momentous shift in family law in England and Wales.

It saw the introduction of the first major reform in half a century of the legislation governing how couples divorce.

Arguably the most eye-catching element of the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2020/11/contents) was a change in how spouses applied to end their marriages.

They no longer had to apportion blame for the demise of their relationships and merely needed to state that there had been an “irretrievable breakdown”.

It was universally welcomed by family law practitioners and clients alike as a means of defusing potential frictions between individuals who had realised that their time together was over and wanted to move on with their respective lives.

One other part of the statute did not necessarily attract the same attention but is, I believe, also having a considerable impact.

The law included what was referred to as a ‘cooling-off’ period once the initial divorce application was made to allow those people who perhaps weren’t totally convinced that they wanted to split a chance to reconsider before it was too late.

It meant that once a sole or joint application was made, those behind it have to wait 20 weeks before being able to apply for a Conditional Order – the first of two orders bringing a marriage to a formal close (the second being the Final Order).

We can glean the net effect from figures newly published by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-court-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2025/family-court-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2025).

They show that divorces concluded during 2024 took just under 66 weeks on average for a Final Order to be granted. A decade before, it had taken 49.2 weeks.

We can reasonably expect the process to take even longer if data from the first quarter of this year is taken into account. It showed that divorces now take 74 weeks – or, to put it another way,  17 months – to finalise.

The MoJ numbers have been given almost coincidental context by the release of the latest divorce figures by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

They show that 102,678 divorced in England and Wales in 2023 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2023).

Although that represents an increase of just over 28 per cent on the year before, we need to bear in mind that many couples deferred their divorces until the legal reforms took effect at the start of April 2022, thereby depressing that year’s total.

Amidst the misfortune associated with a tally of individuals ending their marriages, the ONS’ material appears to show a glimmer of comfort.

The average length of marriages which ended in divorce in 2023 was 12.7 years – one of the longest such durations on record.

However, and without wishing to sound too downbeat, I wonder whether that figure is artificially inflated in some instances at least by the time now taken to complete divorces.

Choosing to divorce is, generally, not an easy decision to take but, once it is made, those involved often want to finalise their separation legally and financially as swiftly as possible.

It can come as an unpleasant surprise to those people able to agree how to fairly divide their assets to find that they must wait such a long time to complete the divorce process.

After the five-month ‘cooling-off’ period, couples are able to apply for a Conditional Order.

The experience of myself and my colleagues at Hall Brown is that the courts are currently taking a number of weeks to process these applications before confirming a date on which a Conditional Order will be pronounced.

Individuals could, therefore, quite easily be waiting seven months or more before they actually receive their Conditional Order.

Thereafter, the law states that couples must then wait at least six weeks and one day before applying for their Final Order – something which in itself may take a number of weeks to be dealt with.

That delay can create tensions of its own, not least because any financial agreement which may already have been reached could need to be revised because of how changes in the wider economy might undermine the valuations of property, pensions or businesses.

Such pressures can turn an amicable situation into something rather less so and that is one reason why we may recommend that couples enter into something called a ‘separation agreement’.

In situations where couples have already agreed how their assets should be divided and wish to have as much certainty as possible that any potential delays in their divorce will not affect those terms, a separation agreement can act as a framework for an eventual settlement.

Under the previous legislative regime, discussions about finances might take longer to complete than the process of obtaining the conditional or final orders.

In many cases, the time taken by overworked family courts to handle those orders means things have been reversed.

It is true that putting a separation agreement in place adds another small layer of cost to a divorce.

Nevertheless, it can help prevent the prospect of a financial agreement unravelling and leading to a lengthy and far more costly litigation in the future.