Full judgment here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldjudgmt/jd001026/white-1.htm

White v White is the big daddy. A decision of the House of Lords, the most senior court in the UK, it transformed financial remedies disputes. Before White, the courts had concerned themselves with calculating, and trying to meet, an applicant’s “reasonable requirements”. That was the extent of your claim.

White changed the game. It identified the general objective of achieving a fair outcome. It made clear that there was to be no discrimination between husband and wife in the respective roles they played during the marriage. And it introduced the “yardstick of equality”. Suddenly, instead of cases being focused on how much of the husband’s money the wife could justify claiming, the onus was on each of the parties to explain why the division should be anything other than equal.

What was it about?

White was a farming case. The parties had been married 30 years and had two farms – one owned by the parties jointly and the other owned by the husband, inherited from his father. Their combined net worth was £4.6m.

At first instance, Holman J assessed the wife’s reasonable requirements at £980,000. Her wish for a farm of her own was not a “reasonable requirement” – that could be met by giving her a farmhouse to live in an a Duxbury fund representing capitalised maintenance. It would be achieved by having the wife transfer her interest in the farm to the husband in exchange for a settlement payment of £800,000 and allowing her to keep her sole assets.

The decision was made, at least in part, to try to avoid breaking up the farming business. That remained a key consideration for the Court of Appeal, even as it increased the wife’s award to £1.5m.

In fact, the House of Lords did not overturn the Court of Appeal’s decision, despite their award departing significantly from equality of division. But it was the discussions surrounding that, and the way the judges reached that conclusion, that has changed the landscape for financial remedy proceedings ever since.

Application to Middle Money Cases

White is not a middle money case. £4.6m is a lot of money now, and went an awful lot further in 2000 when this case was decided. But the fundamental principles set out in the judgment are of such general applicability that they have continue to be mark out the pitch on which all financial remedy claims are played out.

Useful Quotes and Passages

“[T]he legislation does not state explicitly what is to be the aim of the courts when exercising these wide powers. Implicitly, the objective must be to achieve a fair outcome. The purpose of these powers is to enable the court to make fair financial arrangements on or after divorce in the absence of agreement between the former spouses: see Thorpe LJ in Dart v Dart [1996] 2 FLR 286, 294. The powers must always be exercised with this objective in view, giving first consideration to the welfare of the children.”

Lord Nicholls at 604-605

“[T]here is one principle of universal application which can be stated with confidence. In seeking to achieve a fair outcome, there is no place for discrimination between husband and wife and their respective roles. Typically, a husband and wife share the activities of earning money, running their home and caring for their children. Traditionally, the husband earned the money, and the wife looked after the home and the children. This traditional division of labour is no longer the order of the day. Frequently both parents work. Sometimes it is the wife who is the money-earner, and the husband runs the home and cares for the children during the day. But whatever the division of labour chosen by the husband and wife, or forced upon them by circumstances, fairness requires that this should not prejudice or advantage either party when considering paragraph (f), relating to the parties’ contributions.”

Lord Nicholls at 605

“Sometimes, having carried out the statutory exercise, the judge’s conclusion involves a more or less equal division of the available assets. More often, this is not so. More often, having looked at all the circumstances, the judge’s decision means that one party will receive a bigger share than the other. Before reaching a firm conclusion and making an order along these lines, a judge would always be well advised to check his tentative views against the yardstick of equality of division. As a general guide, equality should be departed from only if, and to the extent that, there is good reason for doing so. The need to consider and articulate reasons for departing from equality would help the parties and the court to focus on the need to ensure the absence of discrimination.”

Lord Nicholls at 605

Relevance to the Two Houses Framework

Does the judgment in White support or undermine the current version of the framework?

This case falls comfortably in the Big Money box:

“The available assets substantially exceeded the amounts required by Mr and Mrs White for their financial needs, in terms of a home and income for each of them.”

Lord Nicholls at 602

In truth, despite its seminal place in financial remedies case law, White has little direct impact on the other categories except that it remains the definitive source for refusing to discriminate between the parties’ respective roles within the marriage, and to introduce the concept of the yardstick of equality (which may be of some interest in sub-needs cases).

Beyond that, most of the judicial comments that may be relevant to middle money cases are obiter and have in any event been the subject of specific decisions in the 23 years since. It does not therefore particular support or undermine the proposed framework.