Case No. LS20P01640

, at least insofar as money and property can achieve those ends.” (emphasis by underlining added).15.Thorpe LJ went on to give guidance about how the court should approach such a claim where at least one of the parties is “somewhere on the spectrum from affluent to fabulously rich” (and this, I may add, is one such case); he said this, at [45]:“[45] Such cases may be more likely to be litigated, partly because where the parents are of more modest means financial liabilities will be conclusively settled by the administrative process under the Child Support Acts, to which the judicial process is only supplementary, and second because the affluent and the very rich may be less deterred by the costs of litigation. The starting point for the judge should be to decide, at least generically, the home that the respondent must provide for the child. The value, the size, and the location of the home all bear upon the reasonable capital cost of furnishing and equipping it as well as upon future income needs, directly in the case of outgoings but also indirectly in the case of external expenditure such as travel, education, and perhaps even holidays. The home will ordinarily be transiently required during the child's minority or until further order. The appropriate legal mechanism is therefore a settlement of property order. Since the respondent is entitled to the reversion, which in certain circumstances may fall in before the child's majority, the respondent must have some right to veto an unsuitable investment.[46] Once that decision has been taken the amount of the lump sum should be easier to judge. For the choice of home introduces some useful boundaries. In most cases the lump sum meets the cost of furnishing and equipping the home and the cost of the family car.[47] Those issues settled the judge can proceed to determine what budget the mother reasonably requires to fund her expenditure in maintaining the home and its contents and in meeting her other expenditure external to the home, such as school fees, holidays, routine travel expenses, entertainments, presents, etc. In approaching this last decision, the judge is likely to be assailed by rival budgets that specialist family lawyers are adept at producing. Invariably the applicant's budget hovers somewhere between the generous and the extravagant. Invariably the respondent's budget expresses parsimony. These arts have been developed in Matrimonial Causes Act claims, particularly where the budget is advanced to found the calculation of the price of the clean break. But it is worth emphasising the trite point that, by contrast, an order for periodical payments is always variable and will generally have to be revisited to reflect both relevant changes of circumstance and also the factor of inflation. Therefore in my judgment the court should discourage undue bickering over budgets. What is required is a broad common-sense assessment. What the court first ordains may have a comparatively brief life before a review is claimed by one or other party.”16.In this case, as in many of its kind, a number of the ongoing heads of claim appear on the face of them to be for the benefit of the applicant mother only. She is of course caring for Zoe, (with the nanny). Mr Thorpe urges me to view these aspects of her claim with a “kind eye”. On this aspect, in Re P, Thorpe LJ went on to say this:“[48]: In making this broad assessment how should the judge approach the mother's allowance, perhaps the most emotive element in the periodical payments assessment? The respondent will often accept with equanimity elements within the claim that are incapable of benefiting the applicant (for instance school fees or children's clothing) but payments which the respondent may see as more for the benefit of the applicant than the child are likely to be bitterly resisted. Thus there is an inevitable tension between the two propositions, both correct in law, first that the applicant has no personal entitlement, second that she is entitled to an allowance as the child's primary carer. Balancing this tension may be difficult in individual cases. In my judgment the mother's entitlement to an allowance as the primary carer (an expression which I stress)