FAMILYFinancial provision order - appeal from district judge - circuit judge not to admit fresh evidence unless really necessary or to reconsider factsCordle v Cordle: CA (Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss P and Lord Justice Thorpe): 15 November 2001On the wife's appeal in ancillary relief proceedings the circuit judge admitted fresh evidence, found that the district judge had come to the wrong conclusions on the facts and varied the district judge's order.

The husband appealed on the ground that the circuit judge, having admitted new evidence and ruled that the district judge's conclusion had been wrong, had then made errors of fact in her calculations of the division of the assets, resulting in injustice.

The husband in person.

Jonathan Walker-Kane (instructed by Howells, Sheffield) for the wife.Held, allowing the appeal, that, since the circuit judge had fallen into fundamental error in not recognising that the husband's continuing liability to maintain the children would be subject to administrative assessment in her calculations of the division of assets, the order could not stand; that the existing practice in ancillary relief proceedings which had arisen following Marsh v Marsh [1993] 1 WLR 744, whereby a circuit judge on appeal from a district judge might admit fresh evidence and consider the matter de novo, required revision so to harmonise with the Civil Procedure Rules 1998, rule 52.11 and section 55 of the Access to Justice Act 1991; and that fresh evidence should not be admitted on such appeals unless there was a real need to do so, and such appeals should only be allowed if there had been some procedural irregularity or the judge had been plainly wrong in the exercise of his discretion.