Golf club fails in action over fire caused by faulty buggy
A golf club whose clubhouse was destroyed by fire allegedly caused by defective wiring in an electric golf trolley, has had its claim for compensation against the manufacturers rejected by Scottish appeal judges.
Lord President Carloway, Lady Smith and Lord Brodie agreed with the Lord Ordinary, Lord Philip, that Renfrew Golf Club had failed to plead a relevant case either under the Consumer Protection Act 1987 or at common law in its action against Motocaddy Ltd seeking compensation for half a million pounds' worth of damage to the clubhouse and its contents from the fire in the early hours of 24 July 2010.
The pursuers averred that unprotected cabling in the trolley had suffered wear and tear, resulting in a short circuit where the trolley had been left "energised" at the time, causing heat or sparks that had led to the fire. In essence, the design of the trolley did not include adequate protection from predictable electrical faults.
The Lord Ordinary rejected the statutory claim, holding that the clubhouse was not "ordinarily intended for private use" so as to bring it within the 1987 Act, and the common law claim because there was not the proximity of relationship between the parties that would make it fair, just and reasonable to impose a duty of care – the test in Caparo Industries v Dickman (1990).
On appeal the pursuers argued that proof should have been allowed on the nature of the use of the clubhouse, which belonged to the members of a private club, and whether it was used by the injured party "mainly for... private use". At common law, the circumstances were closely analogous to other cases in which a duty of care had been held to arise, and there was nothing unusual about seeking to impose a duty on the distributors of a defective product, intended for a particular use, going wrong at the location where that use was intended.
Delivering the opinion of the court, Lord Carloway said the concept of "private use" in the 1987 Act was that there should be liability for damage to property used in a person’s private life, but not in relation to "property used by what might loosely be described as economic entities (whether private or not)". The clubhouse was operated for the benefit of a large number of individuals, and was "for the communal use, based upon financial conditions, of a large number of members of the public who have either paid a subscription, tendered a green fee, happened to be a guest or are simply present at a function". Nor was in intended for a person's "own" private use. The case under the 1987 Act was therefore irrelevant.
At common law, he continued, "the fundamental problem with the pursuers’ case, in terms of the reasoning in Caparo, is that there is no category of known liability into which its circumstances might be placed. It was accepted that there was no case in which the supplier of a defective product had been found liable for damage caused by it to the property of a person who was neither buyer nor consumer and into which it had simply chanced to have been left. If such liability were to be well founded in law, the world would effectively become the supplier’s neighbour" – referring to the principle in Donoghue v Stevenson (1932).
Lord Carloway added: "In the absence of analogous authority, it is not possible to conclude that, at common law, there is a proximate relationship between the supplier of a golf trolley and the owner of a clubhouse, in which the trolley happened to be, three years after the supply, and over which the supplier had no control. Leaving aside the issue of whether it was foreseeable that an electric trolley would be placed in a locker room or elsewhere inside a clubhouse, especially when switched on, it is certainly foreseeable that it might be in transit at all sorts of public places, including underground hotel car parks, ferries or roadside facilities; to each of which it might cause indeterminate damage were it to go on fire. This serves only to illustrate that the pursuers’ case is one which involves a substantial increase in existing known fields of liability."
Observing that it would have been much easier for the pursuers to take out insurance than for the defenders to obtain product liability cover extending to such circumstances, he concluded: "Were it necessary to enter into the abstract world of fairness, justice and reasonableness, this would not be a case in which to impose liability."