Tyre Fire Case May Reflect Liability Law Change
A tyre trader has been cleared of liability for a fire that caused £250,000 of damage after the Court of Appeal considered legal issues arising from as far back as the Great Fire of London in 1666 in a bid to determine the ambit of the concept of what lawyers call ‘private law nuisance’.
In a ruling which will be pored over by law students for years to come, the Court ruled that Mark Stannard, who trades as Wyvern Tyres, was wrongly held liable for the blaze that spread from his workshop on the Holmer Trading Estate in Hereford, gutting his own and neighbouring businesses in February 2008.
The fire, which required 10 fire engines and more than 50 firemen to fight it, started in electrical wiring. Mr Stannard had already been cleared of negligence after a County Court judge found that he properly maintained the wiring and there had been nothing to indicate that it was dangerous.
However, despite the absence of any fault on his part, Mr Stannard was found ‘strictly liable’ to compensate the owner of a neighbouring business after the judge ruled that the thousands of tyres stored at Mr Stannard’s premises had accelerated the blaze and amounted to a private law nuisance.
In allowing Mr Stannard’s appeal, the Court of Appeal referred to the consequences of the Great Fire of London and to legal precedents dating back even further than that.
The Court ruled that the legal principle which imposes strict, no fault liability where a ‘non-natural’ use of land leads to something ‘escaping’ from one piece of land to another and thereby causing damage has been whittled away by the courts over the centuries and may now be of very limited application.
Observing that it was not the tyres, but the fire, which ‘escaped’ from Mr Stannard’s land, Lord Justice Ward ruled that the storage of tyres on the premises was not ‘exceptionally dangerous or mischievous’ or an ‘extraordinary or unusual use of land’.
Partner Note
Stannard (Trading as Wyvern Tyres) v Gore [2012] EWCA Civ 1248.