Women 'creating pensions underclass'

The Government introduced the rules, which state each partner gets a fair share of a pension in the event of a break-up, in December 2000 following the Welfare Reform and Pensions Act in 1999. The firm says more than one million couples have petitioned for divorce since the rules came into force yet figures from the Department of Constitutional Affairs show just 7.89% of divorcing couples obtained pension sharing orders between October 2006 and September 2007. The figure represents a slight rise from between December 2000 and December 2006 when 6% of cases had some kind of pension sharin...