Occupants Of Properties Adjacent To Toxic Danger Able To Sue For Personal Injuries

Claimants appearing on the Register of the Corby Group of

Litigation v Corby Borough Council [2008] EWCA 463

The facts: Between 1983 and 1989, D acquired approximately

680 acres of heavily contaminated land in Corby from the

British Steel Corporation with a view to reclamation and

redevelopment. The 18 claimants (C) were all born between 1986

and 1999 with deformities. C contended that their mothers, who

lived nearby, were exposed during the embryonic stage of their

pregnancies to toxic materials that were disturbed during the

course of the D's reclamation and decontamination

programme, thus causing the deformities.

C issued proceedings in negligence. C later sought to amend

the proceedings to include a claim in public nuisance. D sought

to strike out the public nuisance claim on the grounds that it

was an abuse of process, arguing that damages for personal

injury cannot be recovered in public nuisance. D appealed

against a first instance refusal of their application.

Whilst D conceded that damages for injury were often awarded

in public nuisance in the lower courts, D argued that those

decisions were wrong. D relied on two House of Lords rulings

(Hunter v Canary Wharf Ltd [1997] and Transco v Stockport MBC

[2003] and a paper by Professor Newark titled "The

Boundaries of Nuisance" (1949) which defined / confined

public nuisance in terms of 'a tort to the enjoyment of

rights in the land' and which advocated that personal

injury damages should only be awarded in a claim in

negligence.

The decision: D's appeal was dismissed.

In neither House of Lords ruling were damages for personal

injury expressly excluded, furthermore there were other

authorities of equal weight, such as Rimmington and R v

Goldstein [2005] that suggested that the right to claim damages

in public nuisance was not necessarily restricted to those

exercising rights over an adjoining property.

Comment: Lord Dyson's judgment, which

was agreed unanimously, included the following statement of

principle:

The purpose of the law which makes it a crime and a tort to

do an unlawful act which...