Family proceedings – Orders in family proceedings. The appeal concerned what regard, if any, when considering an application to extend the time for appealing in a family case relating to children, the judge should have to the overall merits of the proposed appeal. The Court of Appeal, Civil Division, in allowing the father's appeal, held that, in the present case, the judge had underestimated the underlying merits of the father's appeal, considering that the new grounds of appeal had been merely arguable when, in truth, they had been unanswerable. That flawed analysis had caused him to attribute no real weight to the underlying merits in his relief from sanction analysis. The present case was one where the court could see, without much investigation, that the proposed grounds of appeal were very strong and the merits had a significant part to play when it came to balancing the various factors that had to be considered.