Wood v Capita Insurance Services Ltd

JurisdictionEngland & Wales
JudgeLord Hodge,Lord Neuberger,Lord Mance,Lord Clarke,Lord Sumption
Judgment Date29 March 2017
Neutral Citation[2017] UKSC 24
Date29 March 2017
CourtSupreme Court
Wood
(Respondent)
and
Capita Insurance Services Limited
(Appellant)
before

Lord Neuberger, President

Lord Mance

Lord Clarke

Lord Sumption

Lord Hodge

THE SUPREME COURT

Hilary Term

On appeal from: [2015] EWCA Civ 839

Appellant

Edward Cumming

(Instructed by Enyo Law LLP)

Respondent

Andrew Twigger QC

(Instructed by Birketts LLP)

Heard on 7 February 2017

Lord Hodge

(with whom Lord Neuberger, Lord Mance, Lord Clarke and Lord Sumption agree)

1

This appeal raises a question of contractual interpretation. It concerns an indemnity clause in an agreement dated 13 April 2010 ("the SPA") for the sale and purchase of the entire issued share capital of a company, Sureterm Direct Limited ("the Company"), which carries on business as a specialist insurance broker, primarily offering motor insurance for classic cars.

2

The sellers of the Company were the respondent, Mr Andrew Wood ("Mr Wood"), who owned 94% of its share capital, and Mr Christopher Kightley and Mr Howard Collinge, who owned 1% and 5% of its share capital respectively. Each was a director of the Company and Mr Wood was its managing director. The purchaser was Capita Insurance Services Ltd ("Capita"). Mr Wood remained as managing director of the Company until the end of 2010. He brought proceedings against Capita arising out of the termination of his employment and Capita brought a counterclaim against him under the indemnity provision in the SPA, which is the subject matter of this appeal. Mr Kightley and Mr Collinge were, but are no longer, parties to the proceedings.

3

It is not necessary to set out in any detail the circumstances in which Capita came to make its claim under the indemnity. It suffices to summarise Capita's claim as follows.

4

In about August 2008 the Company began to sell motor insurance through online aggregator sites such as Confused.com. The sales were not completed online: potential customers obtained a quotation from the Company on the aggregator site and the Company then contacted the potential customer directly with a view to confirming their risk details before selling them the appropriate insurance policy.

5

Shortly after Capita's purchase of the Company's share capital, employees of the Company raised concerns about the Company's sales processes, which had resulted in some customers paying substantially more than they had been quoted online. The employees alleged that the Company had presented customers with higher quotations without informing them why the quotations had increased. The Company had thus increased its own arrangement fees when neither the underwriting premium nor the risk profile had changed significantly. The Company responded to the allegations by carrying out a review of its sales between January 2009 and January 2011. This review revealed that in many cases the Company's telephone operators had misled customers into believing that an underwriter had required a higher premium or that their risk profile was worse than it was or had pressurised the customer to make sure that a sale was made.

6

Capita and the Company were obliged to inform the Financial Services Authority ("FSA") of the findings and did so on 16 December 2011. The FSA informed them that the customers had been treated unfairly and had suffered detriment and that there would have to be redress. After the FSA had conducted a risk assessment visit to the Company in November 2012, Capita and the Company agreed with the FSA to conduct a remediation scheme to pay compensation to customers who were identified as potentially affected by the Company's mis-selling. Capita alleges that it, the Company and Capita's other subsidiaries have suffered loss as a result of the mis-selling or suspected mis-selling of insurance products in the period before the completion of the sale under the SPA. Capita's claim is for £2,432.883.10, comprising an estimate of the compensation at £1.35m, interest of about £400,000 and the costs of the remediation scheme.

7

It is appropriate to record that some of Capita's allegations are disputed, including the extent of the mis-selling and any detriment to customers. Other than, perhaps, the facts narrated in para 4 above (which do not appear to be disputed), they are not facts by reference to which the SPA is to be construed. But the circumstances in which Capita and the Company were required to set up the remediation scheme are of some importance because Mr Wood contends that they fall outside the scope of the indemnity clause which is the subject matter of this action. In particular, the requirement to compensate was not the result of a claim by one or more of the Company's customers or a complaint by those customers to the FSA or another public authority. It resulted, as I have said, from information about the internal review which Capita and the Company gave the FSA and the requirement by the FSA that compensation should be paid to the customers.

Contractual interpretation
8

In his written case counsel for Capita argued that the Court of Appeal had fallen into error because it had been influenced by a submission by Mr Wood's counsel that the decision of this court in Arnold v Britton [2015] AC 1619 had "rowed back" from the guidance on contractual interpretation which this court gave in Rainy Sky SA v Kookmin Bank [2011] 1 WLR 2900. This, he submitted, had caused the Court of Appeal to place too much emphasis on the words of the SPA and to give insufficient weight to the factual matrix. He did not have the opportunity to develop this argument as the court stated that it did not accept the proposition that Arnold had altered the guidance given in Rainy Sky. The court invited him to present his case without having to refer to the well-known authorities on contractual interpretation, with which it was and is familiar.

9

It is not appropriate in this case to reformulate the guidance given in Rainy Sky and Arnold; the legal profession has sufficient judicial statements of this nature. But it may assist if I explain briefly why I do not accept the proposition that Arnold involved a recalibration of the approach summarised in Rainy Sky.

10

The court's task is to ascertain the objective meaning of the language which the parties have chosen to express their agreement. It has long been accepted that this is not a literalist exercise focused solely on a parsing of the wording of the particular clause but that the court must consider the contract as a whole and, depending on the nature, formality and quality of drafting of the contract, give more or less weight to elements of the wider context in reaching its view as to that objective meaning. In Prenn v Simmonds [1971] 1 WLR 1381 (1383H–1385D) and in Reardon Smith Line Ltd v Yngvar Hansen-Tangen [1976] 1 WLR 989 (997), Lord Wilberforce affirmed the potential relevance to the task of interpreting the parties' contract of the factual background known to the parties at or before the date of the contract, excluding evidence of the prior negotiations. When in his celebrated judgment in Investors Compensation Scheme Ltd v West Bromwich Building Society [1998] 1 WLR 896 Lord Hoffmann (pp 912–913) reformulated the principles of contractual interpretation, some saw his second principle, which allowed consideration of the whole relevant factual background available to the parties at the time of the contract, as signalling a break with the past. But Lord Bingham in an extra-judicial writing, A new thing under the sun? The interpretation of contracts and the ICS decision Edin LR Vol 12, 374–390, persuasively demonstrated that the idea of the court putting itself in the shoes of the contracting parties had a long pedigree.

11

Lord Clarke elegantly summarised the approach to construction in Rainy Sky at para 21f. In Arnold all of the judgments confirmed the approach in Rainy Sky (Lord Neuberger paras 13–14; Lord Hodge para 76; and Lord Carnwath para 108). Interpretation is, as Lord Clarke stated in Rainy Sky (para 21), a unitary exercise; where there are rival meanings, the court can give weight to the implications of rival constructions by reaching a view as to which construction is more consistent with business common sense. But, in striking a balance between the indications given by the language and the implications of the competing constructions the court must consider the quality of drafting of the clause ( Rainy Sky para 26, citing Mance LJ in Gan Insurance Co Ltd v Tai Ping Insurance Co Ltd (No 2) [2001] 2 All ER (Comm) 299 paras 13 and 16); and it must also be alive to the possibility that one side may have agreed to something which with hindsight did not serve his interest: Arnold (paras 20 and 77). Similarly, the court must not lose sight of the possibility that a provision may be a negotiated compromise or that the negotiators were not able to agree more precise terms.

12

This unitary exercise involves an iterative process by which each suggested interpretation is checked against the provisions of the contract and its commercial consequences are investigated: Arnold para 77 citing In re Sigma Finance Corpn [2010] 1 All ER 571, para 10 per Lord Mance. To my mind once one has read the language in dispute and the relevant parts of the contract that provide its context, it does not matter whether the more detailed analysis commences with the factual background and the implications of rival constructions or a close examination of the relevant language in the contract, so long as the court balances the indications given by each.

13

Textualism and contextualism are not conflicting paradigms in a battle for exclusive occupation of the field of contractual interpretation. Rather, the lawyer and the judge, when interpreting any contract, can use them as tools to ascertain the objective meaning of the language which the parties have chosen to express their agreement. The extent to...

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