Kamran from National Family Mediation answers:

In relation to your specific question - whether your husband has rights over your pension - the anwser is yes, he does, in the same way you have rights over his pension.

Under the Pensions Act 1995 the court must now take pension rights into account when considering the overall redistribution of assets. Pensions are assets that are often misunderstood and overlooked in the short-term because they are not what we call ‘realisable assets’, in that they cannot be converted into cash and redistributed at the time of divorce.

However in the long term, pensions are valuable assets and must be considered carefully. The law relating to pensions is very complex due to the interaction between pension law, family law and tax law and it is very important that you seek independent legal advice.

The pension claims that exist on divorce are designed to compensate one spouse who has inadequate or insufficient pension assets which unless they are considered at the time of divorce proceedings they may not have a chance to rectify later when they go on to draw the pension.

The purpose of the pension options are to ensure that pension sharing is considered in the overall distribution of financial assets and are therefore governed by what is fair, just and reasonable in the circumstances. If therefore you have a good corporate pension you may find that you husband's solicitor is likely to advise him that pension sharing should form part of the overall financial settlement. It’s a balancing exercise where the court will obviously take into account the extent of your pensions contributions which are for a much longer duration than your husband's but this must be considered in light of the fact that your husband, who only joined his pension scheme two years ago, will not have sufficient time to build up his pension fund, therefore losing him the opportunity to have a reasonable income on retirement.

I have included a few brief notes on orders that a divorce court can make in relation to pensions which you may find useful:
  • If you don’t want your husband to have part of your pension you can negotiate him getting a bigger share of another asset to ‘off set’ against loss of interest in your pension which he would otherwise have if he remained married to you
  • The court can ‘transfer’ part of your pension fund to your husband so that when he retires he will have a pension in his own right
  • The value of your pension will be reduced by the sum transferred
  • Rather than ‘off-setting’ or ‘transferring’ pension, the court can ‘ear-mark’ part of the pension lump sum that you would be entitled to on retirement, to be made payable to your husband to compensate him, (e.g. for loss of widows' benefit)
The part of the pension that is ‘ear marked’ can either be a percentage of the whole pension that would be payable to you on retirement or it could be a fixed sum.

If your husband has a savings plan for his pension to which he has been contributing, than the savings are an ‘asset’ which your husband will have to disclose and they will form part of the overall financial settlement.

If your husband, for example, insists on a ‘transfer’ of part of your pension to him then you can and should consider negotiating a reduction in that transfer by the extent of half of his savings above to which you would be entitled to.

 This article is from Netmums.  you can read it here:- http://tiny.cc/tufwbx