Do I Have to Answer the Health Question?

Why we ask

When a court divides finances it weighs the factors set out in Section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. One of those is each party’s earning capacity - not just what you earn now, but what you could reasonably be expected to earn.

A physical or mental health condition that limits the work you can do, or the hours you can manage, bears directly on that. It can be one of the more significant things in an assessment, particularly where it affects whether someone is expected to return to full-time work. You do not need a formal diagnosis to answer - a plain description of the practical impact is what matters.

More on the full set of factors is in what a court weighs up when dividing assets.

Why it does not hold your report back

Originally it did. Health sat behind the same gate as everything else, and the only way past it was to say you had no health issues.

That turned out to be a bad design for a reason worth being open about. Someone with a condition they did not want to write down was left with two options: state something untrue, or be refused a report altogether. Neither is acceptable, and information about health is special category data under UK GDPR - it has to be given freely, and a disclosure extracted as the price of using the product is not freely given.

So the question was taken out of the gate. It is still asked, because it matters, but declining it costs you nothing.

Two different ticks, deliberately

You will see two ways past the question, and they are not interchangeable:

• “No health issues affecting my ability to work” - a substantive answer. The assessment takes it at face value and reasons from it.
• “I would rather not answer” - a declination. It is not a denial, and the report does not treat it as one.

Both let your report through. We keep them separate because conflating them would put words in your mouth: recording “no health issues” for someone who simply chose not to say would be a false statement in a document they might rely on, or show to someone else.

What the report says if you decline

It says so, plainly. Your report will record that health was not disclosed and was not taken into account in the assessment. It will not guess, and it will not quietly proceed as though you had said there was nothing to report.

This is the same principle that runs through the whole form: a declared gap is something an assessment can work around honestly, where a silent one is not. The same logic is set out in why you have to answer everything first.

If your health is genuinely relevant to your finances but you would rather not put it into a form, that is a good reason to have a person look at your case. A solicitor review lets you raise it directly with someone bound by professional confidentiality.