FA-2024-000131 - [2025] EWHC 2361 (Fam)

At paragraphs 13- 15 of her skeleton argument dated 23 January 2024 the respondent clearly set out her application for child maintenance to continue beyond the child’s eighteenth birthday. The application was stated to be made under S29 Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. The skeleton contains her reasons for applying.

The transcript dated 24 January 2024 is of the whole hearing. It was a remote hearing. Both the appellant and respondent were present throughout and represented themselves. It begins by reference to the respondent’s application for enforcement of spousal and child maintenance orders during which there is reference to the respondent’s skeleton argument in support. There is then an exchange between the judge and the appellant in which the appellant explains he has been ill and unable to work and thus unable to pay the existing orders for child and spousal maintenance. In response the judge explains that if that is his case, he must make an application to vary and submit supporting evidence. The appellant responded to that and said he had sent relevant evidence to the court prior to the hearing by email. The transcript discloses that the email was retrieved and seen by the judge during the hearing. It is clear from the transcript that having read the email and documents sent with it, neither the court nor the respondent considered it sufficient. Thus, there is later discussion about the evidence the judge will need if he is to consider his application to vary. HHJ Oliver then at page 96 of the bundle before me tells the appellant to make a formal application to vary, if that is what he wishes to do, and to get a medical report to support his assertions. The learned judge then proceeded to timetable the making of any such application and the provision of documents in support. He then adjourned the respondent’s application for enforcement.

Although the focus of the hearing on 24 January 2024 appears to me to have become the need for the appellant to make a formal application to vary the quantum of the previous orders for spousal and child maintenance, if that is what he wished to do, it appears to me to be pertinent to this appeal that there is a passage, beginning at page 93 of the bundle prepared for this appeal, in which the respondent raises the issue of child maintenance and tells the court that the child concerned will be in tertiary education until the end of July 2028. At page 94 she sets out her reasons for saying that child maintenance should not end on the child’s eighteenth birthday. She makes submissions about what her needs are until the end of August 2028. The respondent was present when she made those submissions and when she specifically referred to her skeleton argument for that hearing in the context of extending the duration of the order for child maintenance. At the time the appellant did not respond to that submission, specifically he did not assert he had not seen the skeleton argument.