Challenging the Cost of Accident Repair - Tim Kevan
25/06/12. High court judge rules in Coles v Hetherton on how far a defendant can go in questioning the cost of repairs done to a claimant’s car both generally and when arranged by an insurer.
In Coles v Hetherton (Cooke J, 15/6/12) we have another judgment on the thorny issue of how far a defendant can go in questioning the cost of repairs done to a claimant’s car. In the various cases, three preliminary points arose around this topic and I will deal with each in turn.
Measure of loss
The first question was “Where a vehicle is negligently damaged and is reasonably repaired (rather than written off), is the measure of the claimant's loss taken as the reasonable cost of repair?” This question takes us back to the debate which raged in the credit hire world a few years back.
In Dimond v Lovell [2000] 2 WLR 1121, when the Court of Appeal (and then the House of Lords) held that if hire charges against a claimant were unenforceable then no loss could be recovered from the defendant, the focus turned to credit repairs. The argument went that if a claimant...
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