Personal injuries - future loss and expenses - claimant not permitted to adduce evidence that future care costs would increase at steeper rate than general inflation

Cooke v United Bristol Healthcare NHS Trust; Sheppard v Stibbe and another; Page v Lee: CA (Lords Justice Laws, Dyson and Carnwath): 16 October 2003

In each case, the defendant admitted liability in damages for the claimant's severe injuries.

The claimants sought orders permitting them to adduce at the trials on quantum the evidence of H, a chartered accountant, to the effect that their future care costs would be grossly underestimated if the effect of inflation were built into the multiplier only by means of the 'discount rate' set by the Lord Chancellor in the Damages (Personal Injury) Order 2001, made under section 1(1) of the Damages Act 1996, and the multiplicand was based on current costs at the date of trial.

H argued that the multiplicand should include stepped increases over time to reflect the faster rise in care costs in comparison with general inflation.

In each case, the judge or master refused to grant permission for that evidence to be adduced on the ground that its acceptance by the court of trial would frustrate or nullify the proper operation of section 1(1) of the 1996 Act.

The claimants appealed.

Andrew Hogarth QC (instructed by Burroughs Day, Bristol); Frank Burton QC (instructed by Stewarts) and Richard Davies QC and Stephen Killalea (instructed by Irwin Mitchell, Birmingham) for the claimants; David Westcott QC (instructed by Beachcroft Wansbroughs, Winchester) and Adrian Palmer QC (instructed by Beachcroft Wansbroughs) for the defendants.

Held, dismissing the appeals, that it was a premise of the 2001 order that the effects of inflation in claims for future loss were to be catered for solely by means of the multiplier, conditioned as it was by the discount rate; that, therefore, the multiplicand could not be taken as allowing for the same thing, or any part of it, without usurping the basis on which the multiplier had been fixed; and that, accordingly, while the Lord Chancellor might be persuaded at the political level to set a different discount rate or his decision might be amenable to judicial review, so long as the rate he had set was extant, the courts could not subvert or undermine it.

(WLR)