A headline in the Telegraph on 14 August 2018 reads; “Unemployed female law graduate ‘housewife’ wins half of ex-girlfriend’s £1.7m home.”

The entirely incorrect implication of the headline is that Shree Ladwa, who brought the case, has been ‘awarded’ half of an expensive home despite being unemployed and a ‘housewife’ (and why the inverted commas..?).

And anyway, in the 21^st century do we really find it acceptable to see such salacious and unnecessary information about a litigant’s sexuality and occupation? Other media outlets have used similar headlines, e.g, ‘Woman who didn’t work in 16 years claims half £1. 3m house.’

I haven’t been able to find a copy of the court judgement and so I can only rely on what the article actually says. But even from that, it’s clear that the main focus of the court battle was a property bought in 2007 in the sole name of Ms Ladwa’s partner, Beverley Chapman. The women had been in a long term but ‘tempestuous’ relationship since 2000. According to the Telegraph, the property was put into the couple’s joint names in around 2008. So from this point Shree Ladwa was the legal joint owner of the property with her partner. When the relationship ended in 2016, court proceedings followed in the Central London County Court.

Judge Stephen Murch found, after a 3 day hearing earlier this year, that the house had been bought largely with money from the couple’s joint bank account, including the proceeds of sale of their previous home. It’s all a lot less dramatic than the headline would suggest. In fact it’s very much like the hundreds of cases involving couples who split up and argue about their property rights, that solicitors like myself deal with every day. I wonder if the media would have been quite so interested if it had not been a same sex couple and if the amounts involved had not been as significant.

The judge found that it was their “common intention” on buying the house that it would be jointly owned, and he rejected Ms Chapman’s claim that she only transferred the house into joint names because of Ms Ladwa’s “undue influence”.

So – yes Shree Ladwa won…but it’s wrong to suggest that she was awarded a half share in the property; in fact she simply retained what was legally found to already belong to her. Perhaps this would not be as exciting a headline, but the truth rarely is.

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Sarah Young Director – Litigation