After a successful opening year in 2022, the Financial Remedies Journal (FRJ) now enters its second year and continues to provide a wealth of information and debate on the big subjects topical in the financial remedies world and I commend this edition of the journal to you, as well as encouraging the practitioner reader to make full use of the comprehensive and immediately accessible resources available on the FRJ website.

Access to Justice

In my last Chair’s Column, I talked about the troublingly high level of legal costs involved in so many financial remedies cases. This is bad enough for those who have some wealth and find that all too much of it ends up being lost to their lawyers; but for those with little wealth the reality is that the failure of either the market or the government to ensure the provision of legal services to this group will mean that they will almost certainly have no chance of employing a lawyer and will probably have to chart the sometimes difficult seas of the Financial Remedies Court without any legal representation. This edition of the FRJ includes an ‘Access to Justice Supplement’ which targets some of the issues involved. This includes Beth Kirkland’s insightful article ‘The Impact of LASPO on Access to Justice – A View from Law for Life’ which highlights the failure of the policy of that Act in the last decade and the ineffectiveness of the MIAMs system really to help at all. The article does, however, draw attention to the helpful range of materials which have been generated towards litigants-in-person to assist with the problem. Also included is the article by Debbie Stringer and Ian Besford, a really informative ‘An Overview of the Benefits System’, which is a must-read for anybody – litigant-in-person or practitioner – handling a case in which state benefits play a significant role in supporting the family’s finances.

30 years of Duxbury calculations

For those involved in the debate about the appropriate status of the recently produced Galbraith Tables in the context of pension offsetting, it is intriguing to read the informative article by Michael Allum, Megan Jenkins and Amy Gilbert, ‘Looking Back at Duxbury 30 Years On’ which charts the birth and development of the Tables. Some people have over the years queried the mathematical assumptions involved in creating the Duxbury tables, which prominently appear in their most straightforward form in At a Glance, but (as is analysed by this article) they have their strong and powerful defenders, not least Mostyn J (JL v SL [2015] EWHC 555 (Fam)) and Peel J (ND v GD [2021] EWFC 53), and judicial approval of their use remains at a high level.

The Football Black List for 2022

Football fans may already be familiar with the annual ‘Football Black List’, designed and published each year to highlight the most influential black figures in English football. There are many names one would expect to find on this list – Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling, Patrick Vieira, Vincent Kompany, Les Ferdinand for example – but the FRJ is delighted and proud to draw attention to the inclusion of our very own Editorial Board Member Sofia Thomas, who gives tax advice to many footballers through her organisation Juno Sports Tax. Many congratulations to her.