Liability for Omissions Flashcards
Stovin v Wise
Generally no liability for omissions
Reeves v Commissioner of Metropolitan Police
If there was specific duty of care to prevent harm: here, psychiatric injury, then there will be liability for omission to do that.
Topp v London Country Buses
Liability for third parties. No liability if the damage suffered is unforeseeable.
Dorset Yacht v Home Office
Some young offenders were doing some supervised work on Brown Sea Island under the Borstal regime. One night the Borstal officers retired for the evening leaving the boys unsupervised. Seven of them escaped and stole a boat which collided with a Yacht owned by the claimant.
Held:
The Home Office owed a duty of care for their omission as they were in a position of control over the 3rd party who caused the damage and it was foreseeable that harm would result from their inaction.
Mitchell v Glasgow City Council
‘A neighbourgh from hell’ - no duty of care to take active steps
Butchart v Home Office
There was a real risk that the claimant would suffer psychiatric harm and the prison had a duty to take reasonable steps to monitor
Barett v Ministry of Defence
No duty of care until they assumed the responsibility for him, so liable when he hurt himself when drunk.
Yetkin v Newham LBC
To plant shrubs which would grow so large as to obscure the view and not to ensure that they were trimmed back was a negligent exercise of those powers. That failure was a cause of the accident. The Local Authority had a common law duty of care towards the Claimant, notwithstanding her own negligence; that duty was breached; the breach was a cause of the accident.
Appeal allowed with an Order that the Authority be held liability to compensate the Claimant for 25% of the damage caused in this accident, the Claimant’s contributory negligence being assessed at 75%.
Coope v Ward
On the facts the Court of Appeal decided “it was not just and reasonable to impose on the Coopes a liability to contribute to the cost of some as yet unspecified engineering solution.”
However, recognising that the Coopes were under a duty, the court made it clear that its judgment did not mean they had no obligations: “it may, for instance,… be incumbent on them in the future to allow the Wards access to their land in order to enable works to be carried out on the Wards’ land and to remove whatever impedes such access, or to allow their land to be used for propping or otherwise”.
Smith v Littlewoods
The House of Lords dismissed the appeals, and held that since there was nothing inherently dangerous about an empty cinema, i.e. it was not a source of risk. The only thing that could possibly have prevented a fire would be a 24-hour guard on the premises and that would be an intolerable burden to impose on the owners in this case. Mere foreseeability of damage was not sufficient basis to find liability.
Goldman v Hargrave
a tree was struck by lightning and caught fire. The tree was cut down, but no steps taken to prevent the fire from spreading. The fire was left to burn itself out, although it could have been extinguished with water. The weather changed resulting in the fire reviving, spreading and causing damage to other properties. The property owner was not responsible for the initial damage caused by the fallen tree, but was held responsible for the subsequent damage caused by fire.
