England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM NORWICH COUNTY COURT
(Her Honour Judge Plumstead)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand London WC2
		Tuesday, 20th November 2001

1. LORD JUSTICE THORPE: This is one of those very sad cases where a marriage fails after 20 years or so, and the parties are left in financial circumstances which do not permit either of them to make a decent home out of a division of the one home that they enjoyed during the relationship. Certainly, it has left one of them very, very distressed. That is Mrs Anfield who is the applicant for permission. She is the applicant who is sadly caught by section 55 of the Access to Justice Act 1999 and its provision that, where the application is for permission to bring a second tier appeal, the application must be refused unless there is some important point of principle or practice, or there is some other compelling reason.
2. The proceedings are ancillary relief proceedings consequent on the breakdown of a marriage. They were tried by an experienced district judge, District Judge Hayes who, at the end of the case, decided that the matrimonial home on sale should be divided as to three-quarters to Mrs Anfield and one-quarter to Mr. Anfield. Mrs Anfield was distressed by that. She appealed, as was her right, to the circuit judge. The appeal came on on 29th June before Her Honour Judge Plumstead. Mrs Anfield appeared in person, whilst her husband was represented by counsel. The circuit judge came to the very clear conclusion that the district judge had got it right. The only refinements that she made to his order were technical. She dismissed the appeal and ordered Mrs Anfield to bear the costs of the appeal.
3. The reality is that the sort of sum that Mrs Anfield will get if the house is sold and the proceeds divided in accordance with the order is likely to be, at best, a small flat in an area that she would not choose. For the husband, his quarter share would not buy him any sort of house or flat. At most, it would buy him a mobile home or a fixed site caravan. It is all hardship, and that hardship is the consequence of the breakdown of the marriage, which may indeed have been caused by a relationship that the husband developed with another woman. Mrs Anfield has got all sorts of anxieties about the way the case was conducted in front of Judge Plumstead. She is convinced that the transcript which has been obtained through the usual orthodox channels does not represent all that was said in the court below. Nothing that I say will give her any peace or any confidence in the justice of the proceedings. But I cannot conceivably grant permission and, even if I did so, I would only alleviate Mrs Anfield's sense of distress very briefly, for the appeal that I would create by granting permission would be doomed to failure and, in the end, all that I would have done would have been to have increased Mrs Anfield's liability for costs and at no benefit to herself at all. Although she may feel that my judgment is as unfair as the judgments that have been given in the Norwich County Court, I have no alternative but to dismiss the application for permission for all the reasons I have given.
Order: Application refused.