The number of county courts in the UK to accept divorce petitions has been reduced to 20, in an effort to centralise the process.
The scheme is already in action in the North-East. Durham is now the single divorce centre court for applications inside of Northumberland, Cleveland and Durham.
Sir James Munby hopes that the centralising and reduction of divorce centres will help to cut fraud in divorce, but recognises that it will not be enough to completely prevent it.
The comments were made in response to the discovery in September this year of a large scale Italian divorce scam, which resulted in 180 divorces being declared void. It was discovered after staff noticed that two Italian divorce petitions were registered to the same address, a distance away from the courts. The address was found to be a non-residential property.
This was investigated further, and a total of 179 Italian divorce applications were discovered to originate from the same address, in Maidenhead. The petitions were processed through 137 county courts across England and Wales. Sir James Munby said in September that he was asked to void a large number of divorce papers, which were “obtained in consequence of what can only be described as a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice on an almost industrial scale”.
The Italian firm behind the scheme were charging couples between £2,900 and £3,700 for processing the petitions, lasting from August 2010 until July 2012.
Couples in Italy are required to live apart for three years before they can be granted a divorce, but in England and Wales the requirement is just that the couple must have been married for at least a year.
Sir James admitted at the time that the fraudulent cases may have been “facilitated” by the ability to file a divorce application at numerous different courts across the UK.
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