The Weekly Roundup: The Bank Holiday Edition

• Published date: 20 April 2022
• Subject Matter: Consumer Protection, Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration, Transport, Aviation, Rail, Road & Cycling, Trials & Appeals & Compensation, Dodd-Frank, Consumer Protection Act
• Law Firm: 1 Chancery Lane
• Author: Mr Conor Kennedy and Dominique Smith

What a lovely weekend! Cunningly this year the team refrained from taking our usual Easter trip to the seaside, enabling us to make the most of the four day break by staying at home and lounging around on the 1CL deck chairs supping the official 1CL cocktail (the French 55, since you ask). And it's just as well we did, what with the entirely foreseeable Travel Chaos plaguing airports and roads. This week's Roundup focusses on would-be travellers both in the holiday context and as witnesses; suffice to say that there seems to have been a shift in the courts' approach to the latter, and just this week a member of the team was surprised to find that a judge in a lowish value multitrack case was unwilling to allow French lawyers to give evidence by videolink, requiring their attendance at trial to explain the operation of the Dintilhac tables. Quelle surprise!

Holiday Travel Chaos: Which? calls for fines over travel disruption

City A.M. reports that UK passenger disruption over Easter has renewed calls from consumer rights champion Which? for greater enforcement powers for the Civil Aviation Authority. An overburdened and under resourced HMCTS, plus the usual hassle and irrecoverability of costs in the small claims track, mean that consumers are too often left without an effective remedy for delays and cancellations.

We wrote about Which? passing 14,000 complains to the CAA in July 2020 ( https://1chancerylane.com/the-weekly-roundup-powers-of-prognostication/), and subsequently about enforcement action against an airline by the CAA under the Enterprise Act 2002 (here: https://1chancerylane.com/the-weekly-roundup-the-de-la-soul-edition/), but Which? reports that consumers are still being ignored or left out of pocket by airlines.

Last year's CAA Response to the government's Consultation on Reform of Competition and Consumer Policy commented that the powers under Part 8 of the Enterprise Act 2002 were 'time consuming, resource intensive, and do not, in too many circumstances, provide a strong deterrent against bad behaviour from businesses determined to benefit commercially from non-compliance'. The report further supported strengthening enforcement by allowing direct enforcement of consumer protection law rather than through the civil courts (comparable with the powers of Ofcom and the FCA).

Only a fraction of wronged consumers seek formal redress for delayed or denied boarding, and there are insufficiently significant costs or penalties for airlines which drag...