Cases - Roadrunner Properties Ltd v Dean
Record details
- Name
- Roadrunner Properties Ltd v Dean
- Date
- [2003]
- Citation
- EWCA Civ 1816
- Legislation
- Keywords
- Expert witness - Civil Procedure Rules - party walls
- Summary
-
In a party wall dispute, where works had been carried out without notice, the dispute centred on the issue of causation and the conflict of evidence called. On the issue of the cause of damage, a court can properly take a reasonably robust approach where the damage to the adjoining owner’s property is of the sort one would normally expect to result from the building owner’s work.
The Court of Appeal took the opportunity to comment on the deployment of expert witnesses in a claim of £6,707. The court noted a district judge had initially ordered that expert evidence should be limited to a SJE, but this order had been revoked when the parties could not agree on an acceptable appointment.
'It is not simply with the advantage of hindsight that one can say that this was not a case in which more than a single jointly instructed expert should have been allowed to give evidence. It was manifest from the pleaded issues that all that was required was a knowledgeable account of the possible causes of the observed damage. It would then have been for the judge to decide which was the more (or, if more than two, the most) probable ... [The court referred to Rule 35.7 of the Civil Procedure Rules.] This was, in my judgment, a paradigm case for the exercise of the power of the court to break the deadlock by naming its own expert or by providing for a single expert to be otherwise nominated. A single expert was all that was needed to tabulate the possible causes of the damage.'