I have a young family, and now require a larger car but I want it to match certain criteria.
I currently drive a Ford Fusion but this is quite a squeeze with 3 child car seats. I have a young baby, a 3 year old and an 8 year old.

My partner is short (just under 5ft), whereas I am tall at 6ft, so a car that might suit me may not suit her, but we really need to share the car as we can't afford to run two cars as we are on low earnings.

We have some money to buy a car, we are fortunate in that respect, but we haven't got the money to run a car with high mpg and insurance longer term.

I'd rather spend a bit more and have a car that would last several years. I don't want anything too high mileage where things might start going wrong with it no long after purchasing.

The Ford C-Max looks nice but the Zetec models are too thirsty round town (some owners are reporting getting just 29mpg round town!), and the diesel models are quite a bit more expensive (which is to be expected) and some of the diesel models are more expensive to insure with several being an insurance group of 20 or higher.

I guess a C-Max is quite heavy which would explain it's poor round town MPG. It seems that the round town book figures don't match up with the experience of those that drive them.

So the key criteria are as follows, more space than a Fusion.
Either an adequately sized car or an MPV
A good round town MPG (hopefully at least 40mpg) as nearly all our driving is round town urban driving.