I am not seeking to suggest that form E is not an extremely thorough document and I am sure that my noble friend is absolutely right on the point. But the amendment seeks to alter the rules from “full disclosure” to “proper disclosure”. If form E is going to be what proper disclosure is, my noble friend may well be right. My point is simply that proper disclosure appears to be a different description. If I have understood her correctly, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said that this was in order to ensure that the whole thing could not be set aside on the basis of a failure to include in the list something that someone had forgotten about or which was so trivial that it did not enter the heads of those entering into it. I understand that that is the aim, but the Government remain concerned that “proper disclosure” could open the door to someone saying, “Well, it was not proper for me to disclose that”. That is my answer to my noble friend.
Finally, Amendment 13 alters the court’s powers when dealing with the division of property on divorce when a prenuptial or post-nuptial agreement is to be treated as binding on the parties so that instead the court can make a financial order as described in amended Clause 1(3). The orders the court can make under the revised clause are an order for a lump sum payment, a property adjustment order, a pension sharing order, a pension compensation sharing order and corresponding provisions of the Civil Partnership Act 2014 and the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 in so far as the provisions of the 2013 Act are not already covered by the provisions of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 as amended by the Bill. This increases the range of orders which can be made. However it still falls some way short of the flexibility that the courts currently have under the 1973 Act and, for the reasons I have already given, the Government still have some concerns about the approach.
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