M (Children)

Judgment

Lord Justice Ward:

This is a highly unusual story and an unusual application for permission to appeal. The story essentially centres around an incident on 19 October 2007, now quite a long time ago. In the early hours of the morning the father of the children with whom we are concerned heard noises upstairs, went into the mother’s bedroom (they at the time living separate lives but in the same household). He found – this is his story – that the mother had taken a knife and cut her own right wrist, even though she is right-handed. His story is that he flicked the knife away and later budged the bed to make the presence of the knife more obvious to the paramedics and the police who were then called to the scene. Her story is that he inflicted the wound on her. So that was the central dispute of that, which HHJ Bromilow had decided in the Bristol County Court on 10 December 2008. He held that this was an assault by the father on the mother. It was not self-inflicted. Application was immediately made to appeal that order but it was not until very recently that Hughes LJ refused permission. This is the renewed application for permission to appeal that order.

On 4 March 2009 HHJ Bromilow refused an application by the father to reopen those findings of fact on the basis of fresh evidence that had been acquired, and that is the second application for permission to appeal which is before us. Delays having taken place -- and it is deeply unfortunate that they did take place -- meant that the final hearing of the care proceedings which had been begun by the local authority were delayed until 5 August. Meanwhile there had been a second application to reopen the findings of fact on 15 July, again refused by the judge. So we have a combined application for permission to appeal that refusal on 15 July, coupled with the judge’s eventual disposal of the case on 5 August when he found that the threshold had not been crossed. Care proceedings therefore fell away and he made a residence order in favour of the mother.

I want to emphasise a point made by Mr Hyde QC on behalf of the mother, the obvious point that this court will not lightly grant permission to appeal findings of fact which had been made by an experienced judge after five days of hearing when a great deal of his finding depended upon the credibility assessments he made of various witnesses, in this case in particular the supporting witnesses to the event. Notwithstanding that obvious difficulty, I am