Family lawyers waiting for further legislative reform to support separating couples will have to wait a while longer after it emerged last night that any consultation on financial remedies, cohabitation rights and pre-nuptial agreements may not appear until next spring.

Lawyers and parliamentarians have long called for cohabitation reform and putting nuptial agreements onto the statute book. The Law Commission’s scoping paper on financial remedies, which presented four models for the government to choose from, was published nearly a year ago.

In a House of Lords debate last night secured by crossbench peer and former Bar Standards Board chair Baroness Deech (Ruth Deech DBE KC), justice minister Baroness Levitt (the barrister and former circuit judge Alison Levitt) ruled out a ‘piecemeal approach’ to reform.