Advice re separation and children's main residence URGENTLY needed

[trulymadlydeeply]

My friend has 3 small children. She and her husband are renting a house but unfortunately her husband has decided that he no longer loves her and that they need to separate.
They have a flat which has been rented. My friend's original plan was to break the tenancy on the house they are renting and move back into their jointly owned flat with their children, but now her husband is saying that he will move back into the flat and take the children with him. He has told her that she is making him leave.
What are her legal rights in this position? Can anyone help?

How is childcare currently arranged? Do either of them do substantially more looking after the DCs than the other?

Advice isn't needed all that urgently, they're going to have to give an absolute minimum of two months notice to their tenants, possibly longer, depending on the lease. As a tenant herself, she only has to give one months notice, but again that depends on the lease she has with her ll, if she's only recently signed a 6 month contract, for example, she's going to have to sit that out, or pay rent not to live there.

So she has plenty of time to see CAB and/or Shelter, and/or a lawyer.

At the moment she works part time and he is full time so she does the majority of child care. I think she may have to work full time in the future if she can because she'll need the money. Youngest is at nursery so she's looking at child care options. Thanks for your responses. It has all happened so suddenly - a real shock to her, but not so much to him, from what I can gather.

Do you think it's likely he's looked into childcare options, or is he just doing the usual nasty "And I'm keeping the kids!" posturing? They'll also need to look into remortgaging the flat, which might not even be possible, given the stricter rules about affordability these days.

I understand your friend is in shock and on the back foot, but once she calms down she can examine her options more closely, and get proper advice. Nothing's going to happen tomorrow, whatever he says.

Thanks Oldlady. I've just checked with her and she says that their tenants leave in September so she has time to get ahead of whatever game he appears to want to play. I feel so sorry for her. I think she's still in shock whereas he seems to have checked out months ago.