I wonder how many people are convinced by the decision of Mr Justice Charles in H v H? Admittedly, Mrs H leaves the marriage with £13 million in cash and assets, including the family home. It is not an award anyone would call piddling. What Mrs H thought she was missing was a further £1.4 million to compensate her for loss of future earnings, or more precisely, the loss of the benefit of her husband’s future earnings. He is 44 the next 10 years are likely to provide him with the best of what is evidently a very successful career.
As hard as it is to feel in the slightest bit anxious for either of them, there is a principle buried in here, one which it seems to me Mr Justice Charles has not distinguished with complete accuracy. He talks down the career which Mrs H gave up in order to provide a home and family for her and her husband – as a teacher she would not have expected to earn very highly. Equally, He talks up the non-economic rewards of being a homemaker – “numerous joys and much satisfaction and pleasure”.
Mr H in the judgment, by contrast, is seen to have built his fortune on labour and personal sacrifice, his success deriving from “talents, hard work and good fortune,” which apparently brought bringing him little in the way of non-financial satisfaction. His wife could not make more than a negligible contribution to his future earnings.
The problem here is that the entire judgment is based on the idea that money is the only real value, unless describing Mrs H’s contribution as a mother and wife, when virtue is suddenly its own reward. Mrs H had a similar education as her husband – they met as students at St John’s College, Oxford – and might have valued her career as a teacher as much, possibly more, as her husband did his. Had she not married, she may have switched after a couple of years to something more lucrative, as many people do. Neither is it fair to assume that Mr H pursued his career purely for financial returns. It is almost certain that he enjoyed what he did and that his career was replete with “numerous joys and much satisfaction and pleasure”.
There is another problem here, which is the attempt to judge the unjudgable. How can Mr Justice Charles know – how can anyone know – and anyway of what earthly relevance can it be? – how much a stable and successful home and family contributed to Mr H’s dazzling career, and how much was attributable to ‘hard work’? And why is his ‘good fortune’ good for him but not his wife?
A further issue is the concept of the ‘clean break’. Following a short, childless marriage it may be possible, but in a relationship that has run into decades and produced four children it is a nonsense. No one gets back their youth, no one divorces their children.
Should Mrs H share in the future fruits of her husband’s career? I would say, “Yes – as much as he should share in the future of their children."
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