When Can You Claim For An Accident In A Public Place?

• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Subject Matter: Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration, Personal Injury, Professional Negligence
• Law Firm: Enable Law
• Author: Ms Laura Williamson

It won't come as any surprise that many accidents and injuries occur in public places, even now, when we're spending more time than ever at home. Some of these inevitably result in personal injury claims. They can involve numerous scenarios, some common, and some more unusual. The one that usually springs to mind is the classic slip or trip on a loose paving stone or an icy pavement. However, claims have arisen from attacking farm animals and wayward bouncy castles to name but two.

What all these claims have in common however is that the accident occurred in a place that the injured person was entitled to be, for instance, a shop, a street, or a park, and somewhere that was not the individual's home, or place of work. A claim is often still possible of course, if the accident occurred at work, but this would be categorised as an employer's liability claim.

Claiming compensation for an accident in a public place can fall under several different laws and regimes depending on where the accident took place. These types of claim are often referred to as public liability claims. A public liability claim includes cases where the injuries occurred local authority or council property, such as a park or a street, but the term can also include accidents on privately owned land.

WHAT MAKES AN INJURY CLAIM PUBLIC?

What makes it 'public' is that access is allowed by the owners at the time the accident occurs. This covers a wide range of locations and premises such as shops, restaurants, hotels, swimming pools, train stations, and outdoor spaces such as golf courses and amusement parks. These are also known as occupier's liability claims.

These claims don't always involve the type of injuries that you might expect. While there are of course some tripping and slipping incidents, leading to broken or sprained ankles, it is not unusual to see injuries as diverse as burns and scalds, food poisoning, drowning, amputations, brain injury, and even death.

Bringing a claim however isn't always as simple as you might think. It isn't enough to have been injured in a public place. While the owner of the land or property owes a duty of care to the public to keep them safe, this isn't absolute, and if they have taken reasonable care to avoid foreseeable injury, a claim is unlikely to succeed. There needs therefore to be some negligence or breach of duty on the part of whoever, owns or has control over, the land.

Sometimes the negligence can be clear cut. An obvious spillage in a shop...