Peter Hungerford-Welch, associate dean, The City Law School, City University London. W www.city.ac.uk/law
A consent order cannot be set aside except on strict grounds, namely where the parties and the court have been misled as to existing circumstances and would have not made the order if the true state of things had been known; and cases in which there has been a material change of circumstances after the order, so that the parties and the court would not have considered the order appropriate had it been known what was about to happen.