#6590 - Spencer V. Wincanton Holdings - Commercial Remedies BCL

Spencer v. Wincanton Holdings

Facts

The defendant appellant employed the claimant respondent as a shunter-driver at its premises. In March 2000 the respondent injured his right knee at work which was caused by the appellant’s employee’s negligence. Liability was admitted for the injury to the respondent’s knee and the subsequent complications that developed which resulted in an above the knee amputation in February 2003. He was fitted with a prosthesis, but pending further adaptations to his car, it could not be worn whilst driving.

On October 14, 2003 the respondent pulled into a petrol station and filled his car with petrol without wearing his prosthesis or using his sticks. He tripped and fell and suffered further injury that resulted in him becoming wheelchair dependent. The respondent claimed damages from the appellant for the additional disability caused by the second accident.

Holding

The court held that the chain of causation is only broken in cases where the subsequent injury resulted from the reckless or unreasonable act of the claimant – in such cases, the claimant is not liable for the second injury. However, in cases where the claimant cannot be said to have been acting unreasonably, the defendant is responsible for the second injury – though the claimant may be partly responsible for contributory negligence.

For my part I see no good reason to go behind or beyond the judge’s own measured evaluation of this element of the case. If the judge had found Mr Spencer principally to blame, the case might have been closer to McKew. As it is, the apportionment of blame speaks clearly against a finding either that Mr Spencer acted recklessly or that it was unfair to treat the chain of causation as surviving his fall. Like the amputation, the fall was, on the judge’s findings, an unexpected but real consequence of the original accident, albeit one to which Mr Spencer’s own misjudgement contributed.

In my view Judge Bullimore made no error of law in holding the appellants principally liable in damages for the consequences of the respondent’s fall on the petrol station forecourt.

Aikens LJ

Was the second fall a “reasonably foreseeable” consequence? Remoteness

The different “ kinds of consequence ” are not to be so narrowly defined as Mr Nolan would suggest. The “kind of consequence” in question here is: personal injury and damages that results from it. Mr Nolan had to accept that amputation of Mr Spencer’s right leg above the knee was a kind of consequence that was reasonably foreseeable to a reasonable employer at the time of the original breach of duty in 2000. Mr Nolan also accepted that, after the amputation, it was foreseeable, even perhaps likely, that Mr Spencer might fall. Therefore, if personal injury and its consequences, i.e. amputation, were a kind of consequence that was foreseeable by the reasonable employer at the time of the first accident, it must follow that personal injury following on from that amputation, which injury was caused by the amputation (in the sense that “but for” that amputation, it would not have occurred), must also be a kind of consequence that was reasonably foreseeable at the time of the first accident.

Difference between novus actus interveniens and...