Pensions and consent order

Hello, this is my first post.

We are getting divorced after a long marriage. We are amicable, and H and I are splitting all assets 50/50. House (no mortgage) and cash division is easy.

The issue is pensions. We both have public sector pensions, his is v large (teachers pensions), mine quite negligible (NHS). We cannot apply for a Consent Order and pension sharing order without CETVs of these, and since they are in payment, this is going to take months and months.... I have been told by one of the telephone NHS pension advisers it may well be a year.

In addition to this, we are both affected by the McCloud judgement, which means that we have to make a decision about whether to take option A or option B for our pensions going forward; this is called a "remedy" I think, and we'd be unable to do a pension sharing calculation/get pension sharing order without it. The latest date these remedy letters have to arrive for all pensioners is April 2025, so it's safe to assume it'll be around then.

The Decree Nisi (conditional order) can be applied for earlier, from Jan 15th 2025.

We're both keen to get on with getting divorced. I've said we're amicable and we are but obviously it's no fun living in a house together.

My question is, am I right to say I must not get divorced (ie, apply for Final Order/Decree Absolute) before I have a financial consent order in place? Which will be after next April. And what do we do in the meantime while we wait for our CETVs and remedy letters to arrive? Can we sell the house?

Apologies for essay. I do have a solicitor, and she's happy about the 50/50 split. I'm just asking so I know when to instruct her re a financial consent order. My instinct is to do it asap, but it looks like we're going to have to wait ages, due to administrative delay by public sector pension providers.

Hi IT girl,
I’ve been in a similar situation 50/50 amicable split of assets (but we aren’t applying for pension sharing, each happy to keep own current state and public sector pensions in payment). We still had to apply for CETV for the Consent Order though, and as it happened, we got our CETVs through quicker than we had feared.
However in the meantime we carried on with our online joint divorce application. And we are now divorced. In fact I have remarried!
We are now going through the hoops of getting the Consent Order, so it is possible to do it this way around. BUT
There are risks….mainly that if things did turn more contentious and got adversarial, we may have less control in keeping anything like an inheritance, or claim for maintenance, or a big win on the premium bonds in the meantime, could get messy.

We decided to take the risk as my new husband and I were keen to get on with our new lives asap and health and happiness trumped the need to be “guaranteed” a particular financial resolution.
P.S. we haven’t involved any solicitors yet! And hope not to have to!
Not sure that’s helped you. But best of luck to you

The thing you need to be aware of is that once you get the decree absolute then you will no longer be married, so if your ex died then you would no longer be eligible for a surviving spouses pension. If the pension hadn’t been shared you would lose a lot of money.

Thank you for your reply. I’m very glad it all worked out for you!

Yes that’s what I was worried about. Ok, thank you very much. I’ll make sure the financial consent order is in place before the divorce is through.