Compensations in UK Law

In effect the Court, before it interferes with an award of damages, should be satisfied that the Judge has acted upon a wrong principle of law, or has misapprehended the facts, or has for these or other reasons made a wholly erroneous estimate of the damage suffered. It is not enough that there is a balance of opinion or preference. The scale must go down heavily against the figure attacked if the Appellate Court is to interfere, whether on the ground of excess or insufficiency.

Nor do I accept that the plaintiffs must give credit under the heading of "betterments for the fact that their new factory is modern in design and materials. To do so would be the equivalent of forcing the plaintiffs to invest their money in the modernising of their plant which might be highly inconvenient for then.

We were referred to the cases where a house is damaged or destroyed by the fault of a tortfeasor. If the injured person reasonably goes to the expense of repairing the house, the tortfeasor may well be bound to pay the cost of repair, less an allowance because new work takes the place of old: see Lukin v. Godsell, Peake's Additional Cases, 15; Hide v. Thornborough (1846) 2 Carrington & Kirwan, 250.

I agree. It seems to me that the authorities to which our attention was drawn do establish that any loss sustained by a dispossessed owner (at all events one who occupies his house) which flows from a compulsory acquisition may properly be regarded as the subject of compensation for disturbance, provided, first, that it is not too remote and, secondly, that it is the natural and reasonable consequence of the dispossession of the owner.

Is there any reason why the court should not award by way of damages for breach of contract some modest sum, not based on difference in value, but solely to compensate the buyer for his disappointed expectations? Is the law of damages so inflexible, as I asked earlier, that it cannot find some middle ground in such a case? But it may be that it would have afforded an alternative ground for justifying the judge's award of damages.

(1) Interpretation is the ascertainment of the meaning which the document would convey to a reasonable person having all the background knowledge which would reasonably have been available to the parties in the situation in which they were at the time of the contract.

(2) The background was famously referred to by Lord Wilberforce as the "matrix of fact," but this phrase is, if anything, an understated description of what the background may include. Subject to the requirement that it should have been reasonably available to the parties and to the exception to be mentioned next, it includes absolutely anything which would have affected the way in which the language of the document would have been understood by a reasonable man.