The Petitioners were atheists, and had been disturbed when they discovered that their baby's cremated remains had been interred in a consecrated part of the cemetery, when there was an adjacent unconsecrated area available. Neither the funeral directors nor the burial authority's officer who dealt with the interment had explained the nature of each area of land. The Chancellor determined that there had been a fundamental mistake of fact on the part of the petitioners as to the nature of the plot in which they agreed to have the ashes of their baby interred, and he granted a faculty for exhumation and reinterment.

The Dean of Arches granted leave to appeal against the decision of the Deputy Chancellor in Re Cheshunt Cemetery (No. 2) [2018] ECC StA 2 not to allow the exhumation of the cremated remains of the petitioners' baby son. Leave was granted on two grounds: (a) the Deputy Chancellor was wrong ... to categorise the Appellants’ case as “one of change of mind rather than a (potentially operative) type of mistake ... namely a lack of understanding as to the significance of interment in consecrated ground”; and (b) the Deputy Chancellor thereby failed to consider whether this mistake was capable of constituting exceptional circumstances within the law as laid down in Re Blagdon Cemetery [2002] Fam. 299 and/or to explain why this was not so.

A breach of the churchyards regulations had been referred to the Chancellor. A memorial had been installed in the churchyard, without waiting for the Rector’s decision, and the design included a red poppy with green leaves. The regulations did not permit coloured motifs. Although the lady who ordered the memorial for her husband’s grave from a local stonemason was not aware of the regulations, the Chancellor pointed out that the stonemason should have been aware of the regulations and should have informed his client that approval was needed from the Chancellor for a coloured motif. The lady had requested a red poppy, as her husband had been involved for 15 years in collecting funds for the British Legion. On compassionate grounds, the Chancellor decided that the colouring of the red poppy could remain, but that the green colouring should be removed and either that part of the design left uncoloured or painted in a manner permitted by the Regulations.

The petitioner wished to have the remains of her baby, stillborn in 1987, exhumed from Chorleywood Road Cemetery and reinterred with the remains of the petitioner's husband (who had died from Covid in 2020) in Woodcock Hill Cemetery. The Chancellor determined that there were sufficient exceptional circumstances to justify the grant of a faculty. The position of the allotted grave was "inaccessible and lacking in dignity, being tucked into a very small area almost hidden underneath a hedge", and the grave was in a place which made prayer and contemplation difficult, due to noise from an adjacent busy road and from an adjoining property. There had been a mistake in not making the parents aware of the situation before the interment. Coping with this poor location had, over the years, resulted in a serious deterioration in the petitioner's health. And the fact that the remains of the child and its father would be interred together would create a family grave.

The appellant's father died in 1981 and was cremated. His ashes were interred in
the Garden of Remembrance in the churchyard of Christ Church Alsager. The
appellant's mother died in 1995 and her body was buried in the same churchyard,
about 90 ft away from her husband's ashes. The appellant wanted his parents' remains to rest together in the same grave, and he therefore applied for the exhumation of his father's ashes, so that they could be put in his mother's grave. The Chancellor refused the petition and the appellant appealed. The decision of the Chancery Court of York was that when deciding a request for exhumation, the Chancellor should consider whether there was a good and proper reason for exhumation on a balance of probabilities, and the judgment sets out various circumstance which might be persuasive to allow an exhumation. However, in the present case the Court found that the Chancellor's decision was not in error: the father's remains had remained undisturbed for some 17 years, and the two places of interment were within the same consecrated curtilage and separated by only a very short distance. The appeal was accordingly dismissed.

The petitioner sought retrospective permission for a replacement memorial introduced into the churchyard in 2019 by a firm of stonemasons without permission being first obtained. The stonemasons had left the remains of a previous memorial on the grave (kerbs and chippings) in the undergrowth of the churchyard. The Parochial Church Council members unanimously objected to the retrospective application, because they said that the memorial would not be in keeping with the churchyard and because it was installed without permission. The Chancellor took the view that the memorial would not be out of keeping in the churchyard, that it was better than the memorial it replaced, and that it would not be appropriate to order its removal. The Chancellor considered that the stonemasons had been remiss in several aspects of this matter and decided that they should be required to pay a substantial proportion of the costs of the application.

The petition included extensive proposals to carry out re-ordering at the (liturgical but not geographical) west end of the church, where a considerable amount of re-ordering had taken place in the 1980s and 1990s. The Victorian Society objected to the replacement with glass doors of two pairs of partly-glazed wooden lobby doors at the Brixton Road entrance. Applying the Duffield principles, the Chancellor found that, "there is clear and convincing justification for the proposals in terms of the benefits to the mission of the church. The benefits outweigh the very limited harm which I have identified to the significance of the listed building." Faculty granted.

The Petition contained proposals for the complete re-wiring and the installation of new and emergency lighting within the Grade II listed church. The Chancellor was satisfied that the proposed works would not alter the Grade II church to such an extent as to be likely to affect its character as a building of special architectural or historic interest and he accordingly granted a faculty.

The Consistory Court of the Diocese of Winchester reviewed a retrospective application for a faculty to approve the installation of two gas boilers at Christ Church, Chineham. The church, a modern community hub, had experienced failure of its old boilers, leading the Petitioners to replace them without prior approval, believing the work was urgent. The court criticized their decision as a clear breach of faculty law, calling it "naïve." A key issue was the Petitioners' failure to consider the Church of England’s Net Zero Guidance. Despite an energy audit suggesting air source heat pumps (ASHPs) as a sustainable alternative, the Petitioners dismissed this advice without detailed analysis, opting for gas boilers driven by cost and convenience. They failed to obtain meaningful quotes for greener options until after the court’s intervention. Although the court noted inconsistent communication from the DAC, it held the Petitioners responsible for ensuring compliance. While the court ruled that a faculty would not have been granted if properly sought, it allowed the boilers to remain temporarily due to the practical difficulty of removing them before winter. A faculty was granted for three years, with the condition that the church offset carbon emissions and explore sustainable heating options.

There were two petitions before the Chancellor, the first relating to the moving of a painting from the reredos to  elsewhere in the church and repositioning an existing cross to take its place. The second petition related to the replacement of the font, which had not been used for 25 years, with a new portable font. There were substantial objections to the two petitions. The Chancellor granted a faculty for both items, subject, inter alia, to a condition that, if no other church could be found to take the font, it should be taken apart and buried in the churchyard.