You agreed it months ago, over a cold cup of tea: the house to one of you, the pension split, a clean line drawn under the joint account. And none of it binds a soul until a court seals the agreement into a consent order — the thing you apply for with a document called Form A, a statement of information called Form D81, and a fee of £62.
Here is the part nobody tells you at the point of relief. A divorce ends a marriage. It does not end the money. The final order — what used to be the decree absolute — dissolves the vows and leaves every financial claim you have against each other wide open, hovering, indefinite. Your ex can come back. Years later. Not out of malice, necessarily — just because the door was never shut.
It has happened. In *Wyatt v Vince*, a former wife was allowed to bring a financial claim against her former husband nearly two decades after the divorce, because no order had ever been made to dismiss those claims. Two decades. The lesson is not that people are grasping; it is that an agreement written on nothing is worth nothing. The only thing that closes the door is a sealed order.
So you have to turn the kitchen-table agreement into something the court will approve. That is the consent order: a draft setting out who gets what — the property, the pension, the savings, the maintenance if any — and, crucially, whether it is a “clean break” that ends all future claims. You write it as if a judge will read every line, because a judge will.
The timing has its own quiet cruelty. You cannot lodge the consent order the moment you decide. You can only apply once the conditional order in your divorce has been granted — and the settlement itself only takes legal effect when the final order is made. Get the sequence wrong and the paperwork sits in limbo. There is no penalty except time, which is the one thing everybody in a divorce has already spent too much of.
Then there is Form D81, the statement of information, and it is the form that catches people. It asks both of you to lay out your finances — income, property, savings, pensions, debts, what you each need — so the court can see the deal is fair. Full and frank. Not the flattering version. The court is not checking whether you drove a hard bargain; it is checking that neither of you signed away something you didn’t understand. Leave a pension off, round a debt down to look tidier, and you have handed a future court a reason to unpick the whole thing.
None of this needs a solicitor by law, and much of the map is free. Citizens Advice will walk you through the shape of it. GOV.UK sets out the forms and the £62 fee — that figure set from 13 July 2026 — and whether you qualify for help paying it. If you haven’t agreed the settlement yet, family mediation, and the MIAM that starts it, is the calmer road to the terms. If the real problem underneath is debt, StepChange will talk to you for nothing, and no consent order fixes money you don’t have.
But knowing the free routes exist is not the same as having the three documents drafted, consistent, and ready to survive a judge’s eye. The consent order has to say precisely what you agreed. Form A has to open the door for it. Form D81 has to match — the same figures, the same pensions, no stray contradiction between what the order gives and what the statement declares. That internal consistency is where kitchen-table goodwill goes to die on a technicality.
This is where Chris earns its keep. You describe the deal you reached — the house, the pension, the clean break you want — and Chris works with you to shape the draft consent order, the Form A that accompanies it, and the D81 that has to line up beside them, in plain language, checking that the three tell one story and not three. You still decide every figure. Chris makes sure the paperwork says what you mean, and heads off the small contradiction that sends the whole bundle back.
What you walk away with is the deliverable itself: a completed consent order, a Form A, and a statement of information, ready to sign and send — the door, finally, shut.
Ask Chris
Come back when it’s time to make it official.
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