Motor Insurance in UK Law

Just as the duty of care, rightly regarded as a contractual obligation, is imposed on the servant, or the duty not to disclose confidential information (see Robb v. Green [1895] 2 Q.B. 315), or the duty not to betray secret processes (see Amber Size and Chemical Company, Limited v. Menzel [1913] 2 Ch. 239), just as the duty is imposed on the master not to require his servant to do any illegal act, just so the question must be asked and answered whether in the world in which we live today it is a necessary condition of the relation of master and man that the master should, to use a broad colloquialism, look after the whole matter of insurance.

I prefer to give a wide interpretation to the rule, as Lord Esher, Master of the Rolls, did in Byrne v. Brown (1889) 22 Queen's Bench Division, p. 657. It seems to me that when two parties are in dispute in an action at law, and the determination of that dispute will directly affect a third person in his legal rights or in his pocket, in that he will be bound to foot the bill, then the Court in its discretion nay allow him to be added as a party on such terns as it thinks fit.

But instead of amending the legislation so as to impose upon the Motor Insurers' Bureau a statutory liability to the unsatisfied judgment creditor as had been done by the Road traffic Act, 1934, in respect of the liability of insurers to satisfy judgments against defendants covered by a valid policy of insurance, the matter was dealt with by an agreement of 17th June, 1946, between the Minister of Transport and the Motor Insurers' Bureau.

I am in respectful agreement with this criticism of the Friends' Provident case. To this extent it cannot be accepted as a correct statement of the law. In my view the extensive interpretation of section 1(1) adopted by the Court of Appeal led to a conclusion not warranted by the language of the statute. If my conclusions in respect of the claims under consideration in the present case are correct it follows that the Hurstwood case was wrongly decided.

Courtesy car costs: The position of the cost of a courtesy car is different, because that cost cannot be a part of the repair costs, as the respondents acknowledge. The appellants accept that if a claimant is deprived of his chattel for a time, he can recover a sum by way of general damages for that deprivation.

In my judgment, the last sentence of [46] is sufficiently widely phrased to encompass both the case where the State has not fully implemented its insurance obligation under Article 3 of the 2009 Directive (as in the present case) and the case where, although the State has implemented the obligation, the driver or owner of the vehicle has not taken out the compulsory insurance required.

The insurers would be entitled, if they so wished, to send their own representative to the Magistratess' Court and watch the proceedings or, indeed, take such other steps, if any as they were entitled to take. Seeing that they had received the information from the police, it would be a futile thing to require the motor cyclist himself to give them the selfsame information. The law never compels a person to do that which is useless and unnecessary.