“It is important to ensure that you have a suitable savings plan in place and to check regularly that your savings plan is on track to repay this mortgage at the end of the term.”
“This is an interest-only mortgage. Your mortgage payments do not include the costs of any savings plan or other investment you may have arranged to build up a lump sum to repay the amount you borrowed. It is important to check regularly that your savings plan or other investment is on track to repay this mortgage at the end of the term.”
“this was the first occasion on which we knew with any clarity that the Broker had been negligent. From the end of October 2016, I had been suspicious but was uncertain and did not know in what way the Broker might have been at fault or indeed whether the Broker had been negligent at all in our case.”
“(1) This section applies to any action for damages for negligence, other than one to which section 11 of this Act applies, where the starting date for reckoning the period of limitation under subsection (4)(b) below falls after the date on which the cause of action accrued. (2) Section 2 of this Act shall not apply to an action to which this section applies. (3) An action to which this section applies shall not be brought after the expiration of the period applicable in accordance with subsection (4) below. (4) That period is either— (a) six years from the date on which the cause of action accrued; or (b) three years from the starting date as defined by subsection (5) below, if that period expires later than the period mentioned in paragraph (a) above. (5) For the purposes of this section, the starting date for reckoning the period of limitation under subsection (4)(b) above is the earliest date on which the plaintiff or any person in whom the cause of action was vested before him first had both the knowledge required for bringing an action for damages in respect of the relevant damage and a right to bring such an action. (6) In subsection (5) above “the knowledge required for bringing an action for damages in respect of the relevant damage” means knowledge both— (a) of the material facts about the damage in respect of which damages are claimed; and (b) of the other facts relevant to the current action mentioned in subsection (8) below. (7) For the purposes of subsection (6)(a) above, the material facts about the damage are such facts about the damage as would lead a reasonable person who had suffered such damage to consider it sufficiently serious to justify his instituting proceedings for damages against a defendant who did not dispute liability and was able to satisfy a judgment. (8) The other facts referred to in subsection (6)(b) above are— (a) that the damage was attributable in whole or in part to the act or omission which is alleged to constitute negligence; and (b) the identity of the defendant; and (c) if it is alleged that the act or omission was that of a person other than the defendant, the identity of that person and the additional facts supporting the bringing of an action against the defendant. (9) Knowledge that any acts or omissions did or did not, as a matter of law, involve negligence is irrelevant for the purposes of subsection (5) above. (10) For the purposes of this section a person’s knowledge includes knowledge which he might reasonably have been expected to acquire— (a) from facts observable or ascertainable by him; or (b) from facts ascertainable by him with the help of appropriate expert advice which it is reasonable for him to seek; but a person shall not be taken by virtue of this subsection to have knowledge of a fact ascertainable only with the help of expert advice so long as he has taken all reasonable steps to obtain (and, where appropriate, to act on) that advice.” (a) six years from the date on which the cause of action accrued; or (b) three years from the starting date as defined by subsection (5) below, if that period expires later than the period mentioned in paragraph (a) above. (a) of the material facts about the damage in respect of which damages are claimed; and (b) of the other facts relevant to the current action mentioned in subsection (8) below. (a) that the damage was attributable in whole or in part to the act or omission which is alleged to constitute negligence; and (b) the identity of the defendant; and (c) if it is alleged that the act or omission was that of a person other than the defendant, the identity of that person and the additional facts supporting the bringing of an action against the defendant. (a) from facts observable or ascertainable by him; or (b) from facts ascertainable by him with the help of appropriate expert advice which it is reasonable for him to seek; but a person shall not be taken by virtue of this subsection to have knowledge of a fact ascertainable only with the help of expert advice so long as he has taken all reasonable steps to obtain (and, where appropriate, to act on) that advice.”
“it seems to me at this summary judgment stage of the litigation, all that the claimant has to do to defeat the first defendant’s application is to satisfy me that it is not fanciful for her to say that her date of knowledge arose within three years before the issue of proceedings and that it is again arguable by her that the contrary contentions of the first defendant either for a yet earlier date of knowledge than she contends for, or for fixing her with constructive knowledge are not so good as to render her claim fanciful.”
“One should look at the way the plaintiff puts the case, distil what he is complaining about and ask whether he had in broad terms knowledge of the facts on which that complaint is based.”
“18. In Haward v. Fawcetts[2006] 1 WLR 682 , the House of Lords addressed the operation of s.14A, including an examination of the extent of knowledge required by the section. Lord Nicholls summarised the position as follows, at [8] to [11]: “8. Two aspects of these “knowledge” provisions are comparatively straightforward. They concern the degree of certainty required before knowledge can be said to exist, and the degree of detail required before a person can be said to have knowledge of a particular matter. On both these questions courts have had no difficulty in adopting interpretations which give effect to the underlying statutory purpose. “8. Two aspects of these “knowledge” provisions are comparatively straightforward. They concern the degree of certainty required before knowledge can be said to exist, and the degree of detail required before a person can be said to have knowledge of a particular matter. On both these questions courts have had no difficulty in adopting interpretations which give effect to the underlying statutory purpose. 9. Thus, as to the degree of certainty required, Lord Donaldson of Lymington MR gave valuable guidance in Halford v Brookes[1991] 1 WLR 428 , 443. He noted that knowledge does not mean knowing for certain and beyond possibility of contradiction. It means knowing with sufficient confidence to justify embarking on the preliminaries to the issue of a writ, such as submitting a claim to the proposed defendant, taking advice, and collecting evidence: "Suspicion, particularly if it is vague and unsupported, will indeed not be enough, but reasonable belief will normally suffice." In other words, the claimant must know enough for it to be reasonable to begin to investigate further. 10. Questions about the degree of detail required have mostly arisen in the context of the need for a claimant to know "the damage was attributable in whole or in part to the act or omission which is alleged to constitute negligence": section 14A(8)(a). Consistently with the underlying statutory purpose, Slade LJ observed in Wilkinson v Ancliff (BLT) Ltd[1986] 1 WLR 1352 , 1365, that it is not necessary for the claimant to have knowledge sufficient to enable his legal advisers to draft a fully and comprehensively particularised statement of claim. Where the complaint is that an employee was exposed to dangerous working conditions and his employer failed to take reasonable and proper steps to protect him it may well be sufficient to set time running if the claimant has "broad knowledge" of these matters. In the clinical negligence case of Hendy v Milton Keynes HealthAuthority [1992] 3 Med LR 114, 117-118, Blofeld J said a plaintiff may have sufficient knowledge if she appreciates "in general terms" that her problem was capable of being attributed to the operation, even where particular facts of what specifically went wrong or how or where precise error was made is not known to her. In proceedings arising out of the manufacture and sale of the drug Opren Purchas LJ said that what was required was knowledge of the "essence" of the act or omission to which the injury was attributable: Nash v Eli Lilly & Co[1993] 1 WLR 782 , 799. In Spargo vNorth Essex District Health Authority [1997] PIQR P235, P242 Brooke LJ referred to "a broad knowledge of the essence" of the relevant acts or omissions. To the same effect Hoffmann LJ said section 14(1)(b) requires that "one should look at the way the plaintiff puts his case, distil what he is complaining about and ask whether he had, in broad terms, knowledge of the facts on which that complaint is based": Broadley v Guy Clapham & Co[1994] 4 All ER 439 , 448. 11. A similar approach is applicable to the expression "attributable" in section 14A(8)(a). The statutory provisions do not require merely knowledge of the acts or omissions alleged to constitute negligence. They require knowledge that the damage was "attributable" in whole or in part to those acts or omissions. Consistently with the underlying statutory purpose, "attributable" has been interpreted by the courts to mean a real possibility, and not a fanciful one, a possible cause of the damage as opposed to a probable one: see Nash v Eli Lilly & Co[1993] 1 WLR 782 , 797-798. Thus, paraphrasing, time does not begin to run against a claimant until he knows there is a real possibility his damage was caused by the act or omission in question.” 19.
“114.…Under subsection (9) if a claimant knows the relevant circumstances, it is irrelevant that he does not appreciate that they, as a matter of law, involve negligence. And the history of the legislation, which I have already recited, shows that the aim was also to eliminate awareness of fault from the knowledge required. Yet in everyday life we may only be prepared to attribute responsibility if and when we appreciate what ought normally or properly to have happened, and so it is not surprising the authorities contain not only clear statements in line with the Law Reform Committee’s intention in its 20th Report, but also statements showing the difficulty of avoiding terminology which has some flavour of fault-based thinking. 115. This problem, which can arise most acutely in relation to omissions in professional negligence cases, is closely examined by Janet O’Sullivan in “Limitation, latent damage and solicitor’s negligence” 20 JPN 218, 233-244. It is, as she shows, most acute in a case of alleged negligence on the part of a solicitor or other adviser, where the negligence consists simply in omitting to do something which it was the adviser’s duty in law to do (or in doing something that it was his duty not to do) and where the only reason why the client does not attribute any resulting damage to the adviser is that he does not know that the adviser would have been expected to do (or not to do). Even in such a case, Hart & Honore, Causation in the Law, 2nd ed (1985), p.38, demonstrates that the concepts of causation (dependent on knowing what is factually usual) and reprehensibility (central to the concept of breach of duty) are conceptually distinct, although on the particular facts coincident. 116. Whatever the position in such a case, it is in any event not on all fours with a case where an adviser causes or allows a client to enter into a transaction but the client has no reason to attribute loss suffered in the transaction to his adviser until he discovers that the transaction was from the outset intrinsically unsound. In such a case there is authority that knowledge that the transaction was from the outset unsound (giving rise to a prima facie right to complain) may be distinguished from the (under section 14A(9) irrelevant) knowledge that the adviser was negligent: see HallamEames v Merrett Syndicates Ltd [2001] Lloyds Rep PN 178, decided by a Court of Appeal consisting of Sir Thomas Bingham MR and Hoffman and Saville LJJ. The distinction may in such a case be narrow, as Hoffman LJ giving the judgment of the court himself recognised, at p.181, righthand column in that case and as Janet O’Sullivan points out in her article, at p.236, but it is an important, and I think a just, one.” 20. Lord Mance went on to refer to the case of HF PensionTrustees v Ellison [1999] Lloyd’s Rep PN 489. In that case pension trustees had transferred funds from one pension fund to another on the advice of solicitors advising on the reorganisation of a pension fund. Unknown to the trustees at the time, the transfer was outside the scope of their fiduciary duties, requiring the funds to be transferred back. In the meantime, however, a substantial tax charge had been incurred; a claim was eventually made against the original solicitors in negligence. The defendant solicitors relied on limitation and s.14A came up for consideration. Upon a concession as to knowledge made by the claimant in that case the court decided that the claim was statute-barred. The House of Lords in Haward considered the concession to have been wrongly made and the case to have been wrongly decided. Lord Mance commented as follows, at [117]: “The court there treated the impermissibility of transfers, which resulted from advice given by the defendants, as a matter of law. In my view, this impermissibility should, in context, have been regarded as an (unknown) fact – an aspect of the acts or omissions alleged to constitute negligence – or possibly (as my noble and learned friend Lord Walker has suggested) as unknown damage resulting from such acts or omissions. In either case it should not have been until the impermissibility was known to the claimants that time started running against them. The distinction between fact and law has never been that rigid….,while section (9) of section 14A goes no further than to make irrelevant knowledge that acts or omissions involved negligence.” 21. Lord Mance went on to emphasise the insufficiency of a pure “but for” approach to causation for the purposes of s.14A knowledge before concluding as follows at [118]: “A claimant who has received apparently sound and reliable advice may see no reason to challenge it unless and until he discovers that it has not been preceded by or based on the investigation which he instructed or expected. A claimant who has suffered financial loss in a transaction entered into in reliance on such advice may not attribute such loss to the advice unless and until he either makes the like discovery about the inadequacy of the work done, or at least discovers some respect in which the transaction was from the outset unsound giving him (as Hoffman LJ said) prima facie cause to complain. Such a scenario may well occur where there are other causes of loss which appear to him capable of explaining the whole loss.” 22. I was taken in argument to many other passages in the speech of Lord Mance and the other Law Lords in Haward, all of which repay careful study. It is apparent from the speeches that what is and is not required in order to satisfy knowledge of attributability for the purposes of s.14A(8) in a case of economic loss is often highly nuanced and dependent upon the facts of each particular case. The question before Judge Gore and now before me on this appeal is whether the facts in this case are sufficiently known to be able conclusively to determine that Ms Jago’s arguments on s.14A are so fanciful as to have no prospect of success for the purposes of summary judgment under Part 24.”
“38. In Haward at [62] Lord Walker cited with approval the judgment of Hoffman LJ (as he then was) in Hallam-Eames, including the following passage: “..If all that was necessary was that a plaintiff should have known that the damage was attributable to an act or omission of the defendant, the statute would have said so. Instead it speaks of the damage being attributable to the act or omission which is alleged to constitute negligence. In other words, the act or omission of which the plaintiff must have knowledge must be that which is causally relevant for the purposes of an allegation of negligence. … …If one asks, on common sense principles what Mrs Dobbie was complaining about, the answer is that the surgeon had removed a healthy breast. This is not a matter of elaborating the detail by requiring knowledge of precisely how he had come to do the act complained of, such as this court rejected in Broadley’s case. It was part of the essence of her complaint. Nor is it requiring knowledge of fault or negligence. …If one asks what is the principle of common sense on which one would identify Mrs Dobbie’s complaint as the removal of a healthy breast rather than simply the removal of a breast, it is that the additional fact is necessary to make the act something of which she would prima facie seem entitled to complain…Mr Clarke QC for the auditors and Mr Toulson QC for the member’s agents, protested that such a principle was a back-door way of introducing a requirement that the plaintiff must have known that the defendant had been negligent (which section 14A(9) expressly declares to be irrelevant) or was by some other criterion at fault (which this court rejected in Broadley’s and Dobbie’s cases.) We do not agree. The plaintiff does not have to know that he has a cause of action or that the defendant’s acts can be characterised in law as negligent or as falling short of some standard of professional or other behaviour. But, as Hoffman LJ said in Broadley’s case, the words ‘which is alleged to constitute negligence’ serve to identify the facts of which the plaintiff must have knowledge. He must have known the facts which can fairly be described as constituting the negligence of which he complains. It may be that knowledge of such facts will also serve to bring home to him the fact that the defendant has been negligent or at fault. But this is not in itself a reason for saying that he need not have known them.”
“In [the cases of Ali and Dobbie] the claimant did not know whether his physical disablement was attributable to his working conditions, for which his employer was responsible, or to some more or less natural cause such as ageing. He was therefore in a state of ignorance on a fundamental point, and his ignorance could be dispelled only by a medical expert. I see no useful parallel with Mr Haward’s situation. The relationship between a man’s working conditions and his natural ageing as competing causative elements in his deafness is quite different, to my mind, from the relationship between a financial adviser’s alleged professional incompetence and the various factors which eventually lead to the collapse of the business on which he advises.”
“This case involves a decision as to which side of a very fine line Ms Jago’s ignorance falls: whether it is more accurately to be characterised as an unawareness that M4Y’s omission to advise involved negligence, which is statutorily irrelevant under ss.(9), or ignorance of a fundamental fact concerning M4Y’s obligation to advise, going to attributability under ss.(8). The determination of what was the “essential thrust of the case” is in my view (just) capable of falling on Mr Cannon’s side of that borderline depending upon nuances in the interpretation of all the evidence.”
“Although a case may turn out at trial not to be really complicated, it does not follow that it should be decided without the fuller investigation into the facts at trial than is possible or permissible on summary judgment. Thus, the court should hesitate about making a final decision without a trial, even where there is no obvious conflict of fact at the time of the application, where reasonable grounds exist for believing that a fuller investigation into the facts of the case would add or alter the evidence available to the trial judge and so affect the outcome of the case.”
“As at May 2020, being the end of the Re-mortgage, the Claimants have lost the difference between having entered into the said interest only loans and having entered into capital repayment mortgages on the same terms.”
“The said sum amounts to£250,995.00 which is the sum the Claimants will now be due to pay.”