The Reform Gap™
SAFECHAIN™
Intelligence Hub
THE REFORM GAP™
When Family Justice Reform Recognises Economic Abuse but Fails to Remedy It
By Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA
Founder and CEO, SAFECHAIN™ Ltd (Company No. 12038453)
ORCID: 0009-0009-9479-0819
samantha@safe-chain.org | safe-chain.org
June 2026
ABSTRACT
This paper examines what SAFECHAIN™ calls The Reform Gap™ — the space between the recognition of economic abuse within family justice and the remediation of the harm it causes. Drawing upon the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s 2025 Everyday Business report, the Law Commission’s Financial Remedies Scoping Report, the Nuffield Foundation’s Fair Shares research, and Resolution’s practitioner survey, the paper argues that family justice has made significant progress in acknowledging economic abuse while failing to produce legal frameworks capable of remedying its consequences.
The paper develops five interconnected SAFECHAIN™ concepts — The Reform Gap™, The Participation Gap™, The Shadow Ledger™, The Economic Abuse Legacy™, and The Children Dimension — and proposes specific structural reforms capable of closing the distance between recognition and remedy.
Keywords: economic abuse, family justice reform, financial remedy proceedings, Law Commission, coercive control, participation integrity, SAFECHAIN™, domestic abuse
PART 1 — THE QUESTION REFORM FAILED TO ANSWER
Domestic abuse is now widely recognised within family justice. Economic abuse is increasingly recognised within family justice. The problem is no longer recognition.
The problem is remedy.
The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s 2025 Everyday Business report raises a concern that should command the attention of policymakers, judges, practitioners, and reformers alike. Despite growing evidence regarding the prevalence and long-term consequences of economic abuse, the Law Commission’s Financial Remedies Scoping Report failed to propose reforms specifically designed to prevent economic abuse or address its continuing effects on survivors and their children.
Recognition without remedy is not reform. A system that names the harm while continuing to produce outcomes that perpetuate it has not changed. It has only become more articulate about its failures.
This observation should concern anyone interested in the future of family justice. Because the gap between recognising economic abuse and remedying it is not a gap in knowledge. It is a gap in will, architecture, and institutional design.
SAFECHAIN™ calls this The Reform Gap™.
PART 2 — THE EVOLUTION OF UNDERSTANDING
2.1 What Has Changed
Over the past decade there has been genuine and significant progress in recognising coercive control and economic abuse within the legal landscape of England and Wales.
The Serious Crime Act 2015 introduced the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in intimate relationships. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 extended protections, defined economic abuse for the first time in statute, and created the office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. Practice Direction 12J was strengthened to ensure domestic abuse is considered in child arrangements cases. FPR Part 3A and Practice Direction 3AA created frameworks for vulnerable persons in proceedings.
Research institutions have contributed substantially. Surviving Economic Abuse has documented the mechanisms and consequences of economic abuse with increasing precision. The Nuffield Foundation’s Fair Shares Project has examined how financial arrangements operate in practice. Resolution has surveyed its practitioners and found the system wanting. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner has quantified what practitioners and survivors have been saying for decades.
This is not nothing. It is significant legislative and research progress.
2.2 What Has Not Changed
Despite that progress, outcomes have not changed commensurately. The Fair Shares research found that survivors of economic abuse leave financial remedy proceedings financially worse off than other separating parties. Resolution’s 80% practitioner finding — that economic abuse is not sufficiently addressed in proceedings — reflects a system whose practice has not kept pace with its stated commitments.
The legislation has evolved. The research has accumulated. The guidance has proliferated. The outcomes have not improved at the same rate. That is the Reform Gap™.
The explanation lies in the distinction between formal reform and operational reform. Formal reform changes what the law says. Operational reform changes what institutions do. Family justice has achieved substantial formal reform in relation to domestic abuse and economic abuse. It has achieved far less operational reform.
PART 3 — THE LAW COMMISSION’S OMISSION
3.1 The Scoping Report
The Law Commission’s Financial Remedies Scoping Report represents the most significant examination of financial remedy law in a generation. Its analysis is thorough. Its identification of problems with the current framework is accurate. Its recognition of the need for reform is welcome.
Yet the Commissioner’s Everyday Business report identifies a striking omission. The Scoping Report does not propose reforms specifically designed to prevent economic abuse or address its continuing consequences for survivors and their children.
The reform debate has largely focused upon legal certainty, procedural efficiency, judicial discretion, settlement structures, and the overall architecture of the financial remedy framework. These are legitimate concerns. But they are not the concerns of a survivor of economic abuse attempting to navigate proceedings with depleted resources, damaged credit, coercive debt, and an opponent whose financial concealment has not been adequately penetrated.
3.2 The Missing Question
The missing question in the reform debate is straightforward.
How should financial remedy proceedings respond when economic abuse is present?
Not merely acknowledge it. Not merely record it. Not merely permit it to be raised as a conduct argument under section 25(2)(g) in the most egregious cases.
Respond to it.
The distinction matters profoundly. A system may recognise abuse while continuing to produce outcomes that leave survivors vulnerable. Recognition without structural response changes the vocabulary of proceedings without changing their outcomes.
The reform debate has asked how to make financial remedy proceedings more efficient. It has not adequately asked how to make them safe for the population they most frequently serve.
PART 4 — THE SAFECHAIN™ CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
4.1 The Economic Abuse Legacy™
One of the most important insights emerging from the Fair Shares research is that economic abuse does not end at separation. Its consequences persist and frequently compound over time.
SAFECHAIN™ calls this The Economic Abuse Legacy™.
Survivors frequently face a constellation of accumulated disadvantages at the point of proceedings:
• Housing instability arising from coercive control of accommodation during the relationship.
• Reduced earning capacity following years of financial dependency, employment disruption, or the removal of professional credentials and opportunity.
• Damaged credit histories resulting from coerced debt, unauthorised account closures, and strategic financial manipulation.
• Depleted assets — savings removed, investments liquidated, capital diverted through corporate structures or personal accounts.
• Increased debt — liabilities incurred in the survivor’s name without knowledge or consent.
• Reduced access to legal representation following years of financial dependency and the loss of independent income.
• Long-term financial insecurity compounded by the absence of pension provision, reduced National Insurance contributions, and the interruption of career development.
The legal process evaluates parties as they appear at the point of separation. It examines their current financial position. It considers their future needs and earning capacity. But it rarely examines the pathway that produced the inequalities it is measuring.
The effects of economic abuse become the starting point of proceedings. Years of deliberate financial manipulation become the financial reality that section 25 is asked to address. The abuse is normalised into the data.
This is The Economic Abuse Legacy™. And it operates invisibly within the current framework because the framework was not designed to identify or correct it.
4.2 The Participation Gap™
Economic abuse and participation impairment are structurally connected. A survivor who lacks resources may be unable to obtain legal advice, gather evidence, challenge disclosure failures, commission expert valuations, pursue appeals, or sustain litigation across the months or years that financial remedy proceedings frequently require.
The Participation Gap™ is therefore not merely a gap between represented and unrepresented parties. It is the gap between the formal equality of process and the substantive inequality of position. It is the gap between what the court offers and what the survivor can access.
The withdrawal of legal aid from financial remedy proceedings in 2013 has been extensively documented as disproportionately affecting survivors of domestic abuse. The population most in need of legal representation to challenge non-disclosure, commission expert evidence, and navigate complex financial structures is the population least able to fund that representation independently.
The Reform Gap™ includes this participation dimension. Reforming the substantive law of financial remedy while leaving the participation framework unchanged produces a better map of a landscape that survivors cannot navigate.
4.3 The Shadow Ledger™
Economic abuse often leaves traces that conventional legal processes are structurally ill-equipped to capture. The visible financial position — the Form E disclosure, the declared income, the stated asset values — rarely tells the full story in cases where economic abuse has been present.
SAFECHAIN™ calls the gap between the official record and the economic reality The Shadow Ledger™.
The Shadow Ledger™ may contain:
• Concealed assets held through corporate structures that are presented as separate entities despite functioning as extensions of the individual’s personal wealth.
• Undisclosed income streams through dividend manipulation, undeclared directorial benefits, and arrangements designed to minimise apparent income while maximising actual benefit.
• Manipulated liabilities — inflated company expenses, false invoices, and fabricated costs that reduce the apparent value of business assets.
• Coercive debt — liabilities incurred in the survivor’s name through coercion, forgery, or manipulation without knowledge or consent.
• Hidden accounts and savings held separately from matrimonial finances and never disclosed.
The Shadow Ledger™ persists because the disclosure framework was not designed to penetrate it. Form E is a self-declaration. Its effectiveness depends upon the honesty of the disclosing party. In cases where economic abuse has been a feature of the relationship, that honesty cannot be assumed. Yet the mechanisms for compelling its production — forensic accounting, third-party disclosure, HMRC data sharing — remain exceptional applications requiring resources that survivors frequently do not have.
4.4 The Children Dimension
Perhaps the most overlooked dimension of economic abuse within family justice is its impact upon children.
The Commissioner’s report highlights an important and under-examined reality. Children are not merely witnesses to economic abuse. They are frequently victims of its consequences.
When a survivor experiences poverty, housing insecurity, financial instability, prolonged litigation, and reduced resources as a result of economic abuse, children experience those consequences with and alongside them. Reduced income means reduced educational provision, reduced extracurricular opportunity, reduced housing stability, and increased stress within the primary caregiving relationship.
Family justice has traditionally viewed harm to children through the lens of child arrangements and contact. Practice Direction 12J and the private law domestic abuse framework address the risk of harm from direct abuse and controlling behaviour in co-parenting contexts.
But the Everyday Business findings suggest that financial outcomes are also a source of continuing harm to children. A mother rendered financially destitute by economic abuse during proceedings is not able to provide for her children in the way she would have been able to provide had the abuse not occurred and had the proceedings remedied it.
Economic abuse harms children not only through what they witness but through what their primary carer is left without. Financial vulnerability is a child safeguarding issue. Family justice has not yet treated it as one.
4.5 The Reform Gap™
These four dimensions — The Economic Abuse Legacy™, The Participation Gap™, The Shadow Ledger™, and The Children Dimension — combine to define The Reform Gap™.
The Reform Gap™ is the space between what the system says about economic abuse and what the system does about it. It is the distance between the vocabulary of reform and the architecture of remedy. It is the gap between publishing guidance on economic abuse and building processes capable of identifying and correcting it.
A system that acknowledges The Participation Gap™ but does not restore legal aid has not closed it.
A system that recognises The Shadow Ledger™ but does not provide forensic accounting as standard has not penetrated it.
A system that acknowledges The Economic Abuse Legacy™ but does not examine the pathway to the financial position it is adjudicating has not addressed it.
A system that recognises children as victims of economic abuse but does not incorporate financial outcomes into its child safeguarding framework has not protected them.
The Reform Gap™ is not a gap in understanding. It is a gap in commitment. The knowledge exists. The evidence exists. The research exists. The question is whether the will to translate recognition into remedy exists alongside them.
PART 5 — THE SAFECHAIN™ INDEX AND WHAT IT MEASURES
The SAFECHAIN™ Index was developed in direct response to The Reform Gap™. It asks not what institutions say about economic abuse but whether they are capable of responding to it at the point where it matters — the point of decision.
The Index assesses five dimensions:
Institutional Coordination™ — Do institutions recognise the connected nature of economic abuse across financial, housing, legal, and healthcare systems? Can they share safeguarding intelligence across boundaries? Can the whole picture be assembled from the fragments each institution holds?
Documentation Continuity™ — Does information follow the survivor? Is the history of economic abuse preserved across institutional handovers or lost at each boundary? Does the court that hears the financial remedy application know what the police, the housing authority, and the bank already know?
Trauma-Informed Practice™ — Can institutions identify economic abuse as a systemic pattern rather than an isolated event? Can practitioners recognise the signs of The Shadow Ledger™ without being dependent on the survivor to identify and evidence it? Can the system accommodate The Participation Gap™ rather than penalising those affected by it?
Participation Integrity™ — Can survivors participate meaningfully in proceedings that are designed to resolve their financial futures? Is participation measured as a substantive reality or a formal appearance? Is the system asking whether justice was accessible or merely whether process was completed?
Accountability Architecture™ — Can institutions explain and justify outcomes in cases where economic abuse was present? Can The Reform Gap™ be measured? Can it be closed? Can responsibility be identified when outcomes perpetuate the harm that proceedings were intended to remedy?
These five questions move reform beyond process. They focus attention on impact. They ask not whether the system is procedurally fair but whether it is substantively just for the population it most frequently serves.
PART 6 — CLOSING THE REFORM GAP™
Recommendations for the Law Commission
• The Law Commission’s Financial Remedies review must include specific proposals for identifying and remedying economic abuse within the financial remedy framework. The Scoping Report’s omission must be addressed in the full review.
• Economic abuse must be incorporated as a material factor in the section 25 exercise — not through the conduct gateway in extreme cases but as a routine consideration in cases where it is alleged and evidenced.
• The Shadow Ledger™ must become accessible. This requires mandatory forensic accounting in cases involving company structures and allegations of non-disclosure, funded from a central source where the survivor lacks resources.
• The Economic Abuse Legacy™ must be incorporated into the financial needs and earning capacity assessment. The court must be required to examine the pathway to the financial position it is adjudicating, not merely the position itself.
Recommendations for Parliament
• Legal aid for financial remedy proceedings must be restored for survivors of economic abuse. The participation framework cannot be reformed while the legal aid framework continues to exclude the population most affected by The Participation Gap™.
• A statutory duty to identify and respond to economic abuse must be placed on all professionals conducting financial remedy proceedings — solicitors, barristers, mediators, and judges.
• The children dimension of economic abuse must be incorporated into the child safeguarding framework. Financial outcomes in proceedings involving economic abuse must be subject to safeguarding review where dependent children are present.
Recommendations for the Family Courts
• Proactive disclosure obligations must be introduced for cases involving company structures. Self-declaration through Form E is insufficient where economic abuse and strategic non-disclosure are alleged.
• Participation adjustments must be applied proactively in all cases where economic abuse is alleged. The burden of requesting adjustments must not fall on the survivor.
• Litigation as a mechanism of economic abuse must be recognised and sanctioned. Where proceedings are used to exhaust or impoverish rather than to resolve, the court must intervene.
• The conduct of economic abuse throughout the marriage and proceedings must be weighed as a material factor in every case where it is established, not reserved for egregious cases under section 25(2)(g).
CONCLUSION
The Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Everyday Business findings make The Reform Gap™ undeniable.
Family justice understands economic abuse. It has studied it, reported on it, and legislated around its edges. But understanding is not remedy. Research is not reform. Guidance is not protection.
The Reform Gap™ persists because the structural changes required to close it are more demanding than the reforms that have been undertaken. Restoring legal aid is expensive. Making forensic accounting routine requires resources. Incorporating economic abuse into the section 25 framework requires judicial culture change. Addressing The Children Dimension requires a broader safeguarding lens than family justice currently applies.
None of these things are impossible.
All of them are necessary.
The question for policymakers is no longer whether economic abuse exists. The question is whether reform is serious enough to remedy it. Or whether it is content to continue recognising a harm it is not yet willing to prevent.
The Reform Gap™ will not close itself.
It requires institutions willing to move from recognition to remedy.
SAFECHAIN™ is committed to building the architecture that makes that movement possible.
REFERENCES
• Domestic Abuse Commissioner (2025). Everyday Business. Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales.
• Law Commission (2023). Financial Remedies on Divorce and Dissolution: A Scoping Report.
• Nuffield Foundation / Fair Shares Project. Financial arrangements on separation and divorce.
• Resolution (2024). Survey of Financial Remedy Practitioners on Domestic Abuse.
• Surviving Economic Abuse. Research and policy publications on economic abuse.
• Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, section 25.
• Domestic Abuse Act 2021, section 1.
• Serious Crime Act 2015, section 76.
• Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012.
• Family Procedure Rules 2010, Part 3A, Practice Direction 3AA, Practice Direction 12J.
• FCA Consumer Duty (2023).
• Equal Treatment Bench Book (Judicial College).
• Sharland v Sharland [2015] UKSC 60.
Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA
Founder and CEO, SAFECHAIN™ Ltd
Company No. 12038453
samantha@safe-chain.org | safe-chain.org
ORCID: 0009-0009-9479-0819
SAFECHAIN™ is a safeguarding governance framework designed to strengthen participation, accountability, institutional coordination, and vulnerability-responsive decision-making across justice, housing, healthcare, financial services, and public administration.
© 2026 Samantha -Andreassen. All rights reserved. SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453). SAFECHAIN™ is a registered trademark.