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These are the essential facts:

" On 20 September 2017, the TCC court office wrote to the parties to identify 24 November 2017 as the date of the CMC. The letter expressly required the parties "to file and exchange costs budgets not less than 7 days before the CMC." That was in contrast to the current version of CPR 3.13, which provides that:
"(1) Unless the court otherwise orders, all parties…must file and exchange budgets…not later than 21 days before the first case management conference."

The claimants' solicitor served their costs budget on 2 November 2017, in accordance with r.3.13. The defendant's solicitor relied on the letter from the court office (and there is a witness statement to that effect), and therefore did not serve his costs budget until 16 November 2017. Although there was a good deal of correspondence about the CMC between the solicitors during the interim, at no point did the claimants' solicitor ever complain that he was waiting for the defendant's costs budget. The matter was not raised at all.

However, following service of the defendant's costs budget on 16 November 2017, the claimants' solicitor then wrote to say that the budget should have been provided 14 days earlier. The defendant's solicitor explained his position in the letter of 16 November 2017, but warned that, if the defendant was forced to make an application to the court to address the alleged delay, then he would seek his associated costs. Despite that, the claimant's solicitor maintained his stance, saying that there had been a "gross delay" in the service of the defendant's costs budget. On the same day, in a lengthy letter to the TCC court office, the claimant's solicitor maintained expressly that, as a result of these events, "the defendant should be treated as having filed a budget comprising only the applicable court fees, in compliance with CPR 3.14" (ie the result in Mitchell)."

It seems to me, and seemed to the judge, that the defendant was opportunistically going too far.

Whatever, the constitutional position of the writer of the court's letter the fact that its contents can be relied upon is surely useful in these days when complaints of court error are commonplace. I share the judge's view that procedural letters go out in the spirit, if not the name, of a court order and thus have the status of an order.

I assume that the letter was originally judicially approved.

This was a sensible and fair decision.

As to the costs, I suspect that this aspect of the hearing was brief.