Sportcity 4 Management Ltd & Ors v Countryside Properties (UK) Ltd

For summary judgment, the court asks whether the claim has a real, rather than fanciful, prospect of success. It must avoid a mini-trial, while rejecting assertions that are incompatible with contemporaneous documents or inherent likelihood. Contractual liability depends on the proper construction of the instrument. A person’s status as a party, agent or developer does not itself impose obligations undertaken by another contracting party. Under section 1(5) of the Defective Premises Act 1972, remedial work may generate a fresh cause of action, but it does not revive a limitation-barred claim concerning the original work. A new cause of action must be pleaded in the Particulars of Claim. The cost of remedying defects in a building already owned is pure economic loss and is irrecoverable in negligence.

The claimants were management companies for apartments in the Sportcity Living development. The defendant had developed the estate. The claim alleged breaches of covenants in leases, breach of duty under the Defective Premises Act 1972, and negligence concerning alleged defects in cavity barriers and fire-stopping.

The defendant applied under CPR Part 3.4(2)(a) to strike out the tort claim and under CPR Part 24 for summary judgment on the lease and statutory claims. The claimants relied on remedial attendances in 2014 and 2017 to answer limitation objections. The central issues were whether the defendant was liable under the leases, whether those later events revived or created a non-time-barred statutory claim, and whether the pleaded losses were recoverable in tort.

1. Disposition. Summary judgment was entered for the defendant on the claims under the leases and the Defective Premises Act 1972. The common-law tort claim was struck out.
2. Lease claims. The leases defined AMEC as the landlord and identified the defendant as a separate party, “Countryside”. The defendant’s rights to impose regulations, receive premiums, and direct the grant of underleases did not make it the landlord or impose the landlord’s covenants in clauses 6.1 and 6.3 upon it. A person’s status as a party to an instrument does not itself create particular liabilities. An agent may be personally liable, but only where the contract, properly construed, imposes that liability. Nothing in these leases did so.
3. The claim based on quiet enjoyment also had no real prospect of success. On the pleaded case, the alleged breach derived from structural defects present at the time of letting. The later attendances did not alter the character of that pleaded claim.
4. Statutory limitation. Section 1(5) of the Defective Premises Act 1972 creates separate causes of action: one concerning the original work, accruing when the dwelling is completed, and another concerning later remedial work, accruing when that work is finished. Later work, or a failure to undertake it, does not restart limitation for the original cause of action. The claim pleaded concerned the original construction, completed by 2010 at the latest, and was therefore statute-barred. Any claims concerning the 2014 or 2017 events were separate causes of action and had not been pleaded in the Particulars of Claim.
5. Under CPR 16.4(1)(a), the material facts founding a cause of action must be stated in the Particulars of Claim. A Reply may answer a limitation defence, but cannot introduce a new cause of action or preserve a different statute-barred claim.
6. Tort claim. The alleged loss was the cost of remedying defects in buildings already owned by the claimants. That was pure economic loss and, applying Murphy v Brentwood [1991] 1 AC 398, irrecoverable in negligence.