A think-tank run by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith wants to see a Tory government bring in a compulsory three-month “cooling off” period to prevent what it considers to be ill-though-out quickie divorces.

As well as being encouraged to take marriage classes before tying the knot, couples will be required to have counselling before divorcing so they explore the possibility of reconciliation.

The plans, outlined this week, are the result of a report by the Centre for Social Justice called Every Family Matters.

Well, yes, Mr Duncan Smith, every family does matter. But politicians get it so wrong when they wade into the difficult area of relationship breakdown. In our experience, the majority of people who come to see us haven’t been waiting three months to get divorced – they’ve been waiting years! All that time, they’ve been wondering how to put an end to a marriage that failed a long time ago.

Plans for pre-wedding and pre-divorce classes are a waste of time and money. Both ideas have been tried before – and both have failed. Couples who are madly in love won’t suddenly decide to shelve their wedding because a counsellor points out a few blunt facts about married life. Similarly, couples who have been languishing for years in an unhappy marriage aren’t going to be persuaded their relationship is salvageable.

What Mr Duncan Smith and his colleagues don’t seem to grasp is that dedicated family lawyers already have the task in hand – namely, spelling out the implications of divorce. Any matrimonial solicitor worth his or her salt will talk a client through the financial, children and emotional issues associated with separation. You don’t need to set up a chain of government information shops at vast expense to the taxpayer to make people realise what’s at stake if they get divorced.

Very few people take the decision to get divorced frivolously. At the moment, we are acting for lots of clients who first came to see us as long as ten years ago. They tried their best to patch things up, they say, but it didn’t work.

Do politicians really believe that people wake up one morning and think “I don’t have anything on at lunchtime today; I think I’ll get divorced?” Because that’s what this report implies – that couples decide to go their separate ways on a whim. Even without the advice and guidance from a niche practice solicitor, people aren’t daft – they have a pretty good idea of what divorce means.

Instead of spending millions of pounds on counselling sessions for estranged couples, government would serve the population far better by pumping the money into the all-but-extinct Legal Aid system.

Ironically, one of the main reasons Legal Aid was set up 60 years ago was for service men returning home from the Second World War to find they no longer had marriages. Being able to go to a solicitor whose services were partly funded by the Government made divorce affordable to those with modest assets.

Nowadays, if our firm – which specialises in high net worth divorces – takes a call from someone with only £100,000 of assets, there are very few solicitors we can refer them to, because High Street firms that relied on Legal Aid have been driven out of the market.

This is a crying shame, because it denies many desperately unhappy couples the chance to go their separate ways. Mr Duncan Smith might think that counselling will solve these people’s problems and thus stem “social breakdown”, but in most cases all it does is prolong the agony. A quick death, for all concerned, has to be preferable to a long, drawn-out demise.