Held, (1) Save in an exceptional case, there was no practical difference between the words “determination”, “judgment”, “order” or “direction”. What was much more important was that, however it might be labelled, an appeal could only lie against something which had been decided, ie a result, a conclusion, an outcome, and did not lie against any observation or comment by the judge along the way to that result. While it was almost inevitable that there would be a sealed order and, if there was, paragraph 3(3)(a) of Practice Direction 52C required the proposed appellant to provide a copy of it, it could not have been the intention of the Civil Procedure Rule Committee to make the provision of a sealed order some sort of condition precedent, such an approach having no legal basis and being contrary to CPR 40.3(1)(c) and paragraph 6 of Practice Direction 52C. However, in circumstances where there was no sealed order, but there was a determination under section 77 of the County Courts Act 1984 (or a decision or a direction or a judgment), the absence of a sealed order would not itself be a bar to an application for permission to appeal. In the present case, the decision of the judge, which determined that the debtor could not have a copy of the transcripts at public expense, was plainly a “determination” within the meaning of section 77, which was adverse to the debtor who was therefore entitled to seek permission to appeal it under section 77. Accordingly, a sealed order was not required before the application for permission to appeal against the judge’s order could be dealt with (paras 16–26, 41, 45, 46).

(2) Appeal allowed. A request for transcripts at public expense was not “an application” within the meaning of the standard extended civil restraint order and therefore did not require permission under the ECRO before it was made. In general, an ECRO provided a filter to prevent wholly unmeritorious applications, but in this instance that filter was already provided by the requirement that the party seeking the transcript at public expense showed that it was in the interests of justice. It would be contrary to public policy for an ECRO to impose a second merits-based hurdle on an impecunious litigant’s ability to obtain a transcript which did not apply to a paying party. Moreover, since the debtor’s requests for transcripts at public expense had nothing whatsoever to do with the creditor and did not directly concern the creditor at all, there was no policy reason to refer the requests to the judge named in the ECRO and, therefore, the filter exercise to protect the other party in the litigation from the time and expense of dealing with unmeritorious applications by the applicant, which was the principal purpose of the ECRO, was not required. Further, insofar as the ECRO was intended to serve a subsidiary purpose of protecting the court from unmeritorious applications, that purpose would not be achieved if permission for transcripts was required under the ECRO. Instead it would mean that there would almost certainly have to be two applications: the first to one of the named judges in the ECRO and then, if permission was granted under the ECRO (since that judge was unlikely to know anything about the underlying proceedings, and therefore whether or not a transcript at public expense was in the interests of justice) a second application to the lower court or appeal court who would be more likely to be familiar with the underlying litigation (paras 30–37, 41, 45, 46).