Ancillary Relief

The Family Procedure Rules now formally use 'financial remedy' rather than the older label 'ancillary relief,' with Part 9 of the rules applying 'to an application for a financial remedy' and cross-referring to the defined terms 'Financial remedy' and 'financial order' in rule 2.3. The underlying powers, though, still sit in the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. Section 23 lets the court order 'that either party to the marriage shall make to the other such periodical payments, for such term, as may be specified in the order' or 'that either party to the marriage shall pay to the other such lump sum or sums as may be so specified.' Section 24, headed 'Property adjustment orders in connection with divorce proceedings, etc.,' separately allows an order 'that a party to the marriage shall transfer to the other party, to any child of the family or to such person as may be specified in the order for the benefit of such a child such property as may be so specified.'

Pensions are dealt with through the same family of orders. The Family Procedure Rules define a 'pension sharing order' as, among other things, 'in proceedings under the 1973 Act, an order making provision under section 24B of that Act,' and the rules elsewhere group the whole set of possible outcomes together, referring to a court dismissing a periodical payments order 'and its substitution with one or more of a lump sum order, a property adjustment order, a pension sharing order or a pension compensation sharing order.' That list — periodical payments, lump sums, property adjustment and pension sharing — is what practitioners mean when they still informally call the whole application 'ancillary relief.'