Cessation of Maintenance Payments

I would appreciate any help with this matter.
I divorced from my wife six years ago. We were both on relatively low monthly incomes at that time. I wanted to be fair and made a proposal to pay my wife £200 per month for life thereby levelling and equalising our monthly income. I am now 69 years of age and my ex wife is 65.
She moved to Spain one year ago and is cohabitation with her partner who owns two villas and is financially secure.
I bear no resentment towards her but feel that the £200 I pay her each month would be far more beneficial to me now than it is to her,
My question is: is there anything I can do to stop these payments? The Consent Order states that a warrant for my arrest may be issued if I fail to make payment.
Thank you in anticipation to anyone who responds.

You shouldn't just stop paying. The first step would be to approach your ex-wife and see if she is happy for you to stop paying explaining why and so on. Maintenance orders are always live as in they can be varied up or down at any time with a subsequent order so if your situation or it seems your ex-wifes situation has changed and the order was six year's ago it's completely valid to apply for a change. So as I said the first step is to see if she is happy for you to stop which will make the process a whole lot easier. If not and you still want to stop then you will need to apply to the court for a variation. Depending on your financial situation or your confidence in dealing with these issues you can either hire a lawyer to make the application or you can make the application to the court yourself as all the forms are downloadable and if you ask questions on here people will be able to guide you through the process but as I said first step would be to sound out the situation and from that you will be able to get a better idea of exactly what you are going to be dealing with.

Thank you, that is very helpful.

May I add my tuppence worth.

My experience of wives who receive maintenance is that they are unwilling to let go, for reasons which are too obvious to require elaboration.

It is also my experience of judges that they do not like discharging maintenance orders altogether, because a discharge is irreversible. They are much more willing to reduce if the payments are causing hardship. But that leaves the possibility that if, for example, you got a well paid job, the payments would increase again.

What you need to do, and now, is to retrieve the Financial Statements that you and your ex made at the time of your divorce. You then compare it with the situation as it is today. The ground for variation is that there has been a change in circumstances - so you need to show
that such a change has occurred. If you can't, then your application for variation is likely to fail.

You should certainly do this before you start
taking the plunge.

LMM