Unparalleled circumstances

In brief

• Variations to final orders in the light of COVID-19 are more difficult than variations concerning compliance with a procedural step or a deadline.
• The extent to which changed financial circumstances can be said to be the result of an assumed risk or the natural ebb and flow of asset values is key.
• The possibility of COVID-19 constituting a Barder event in matrimonial proceedings has not yet been tested, but any such application will face significant challenges.

‘The coronavirus pandemic’, as Mr Justice Knowles noted in Melanie Stanley v London Borough of Tower Hamlets [2020] EWHC 1622 (QB), ‘is generally recognised to be the greatest peacetime emergency that this country (and indeed, the world) has ever faced’. How should the courts respond to attempts to revisit decisions and orders in the light of such unparalleled circumstances? To what extent, if at all, should the judicial policies of legal certainty and finality