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	England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions
You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions >> Morris v Beaconsfield Motors [2001] EWCA Civ 545 (5 April 2001) URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2001/545.html Cite as: [2001] EWCA Civ 545

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IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE BRIGHTON COUNTY COURT
(Her Honour Judge Coates)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand London WC2
		Thursday, 5th April 2001

1. LORD JUSTICE HENRY: This application for permission to appeal arises in the following way.
2. The claimant, Mr Morris, appears in person. He was the owner of an Alvis motorcar which he left for repairs with the garage, Beaconsfield Motors, who are the defendants to his claim. The garage did repairs on the car. Mr Morris paid them what he could but, because of an embarrassment with his finances, he could not pay the whole sum. He therefore left the car at the garage. Eventually the garage sent him a letter dated 11th March 1999 asking for the sums that were due to them for the work they had done and for which they had not been paid. The letter also mentioned something which, on Mr Morris's evidence, had not been raised before: that is to say, storage charges. By their letter of 11th March the garage gave Mr Morris notice that they proposed to sell the car. They told him that there was £688.30 outstanding for repair work and £3,392 for storage charges. Those storage charges had been calculated on the basis that they were being levied at £8 a day from the date in January 1998 when Mr Morris had left the car there.
3. The district judge who heard the evidence in the case found as a fact in his judgment that nothing was mentioned about storage charges until the letter of 11th March 1999 "was sent to bring matters to a head". The judge said:

"I find that no storage charges are payable up to that date. However, at that stage Mr Morris had a choice, he could either remove the vehicle or pay the storage and the costs of the repair. He has chosen not to pay the storage, but to insist, yet again, that the car should be brought up to MOB standard before he will pay for it. That I think is unreasonable."

4. So eventually, when the case came before Deputy District Judge Hammond, he gave judgment for the costs of the repair work, the costs of retaining a "cherished" number plate (in the sense of money spent in retaining that), and a sum for storage of £3,216 (that is, £8 a day from 11th March 1999, when the garage put Mr Morris on notice that they proposed to charge him).
5. Mr Morris had consulted solicitors and had been told by them that the garage's lien covered the sum due for materials supplied and work done, but did not cover any sums for warehousing or storage. The solicitors armed Mr Morris with a quotation from Chitty on Contracts, Volume 2, 28th Edition, paragraph 33-087, dealing with a worker's lien, which says:

"The lien covers the sum due for materials supplied and work performed on the chattel, but not charges for warehousing or storage, even during the period of the lien."

6. To similar effect, Halsbury's Laws of England, Volume 28, 4th Edition Reissue, paragraph 721, reads as follows:

"The holder of a lien, being voluntarily in possession of a chattel which belongs to another, is a bailee of the chattel and (subject to contrary agreement or special circumstances) owes the normal duty of care owed by a bailee towards the owner. This includes a duty to exercise reasonable care in the safekeeping and management of the chattel and a duty to answer for the deliberate wrongs of those to whom the holder of the lien has entrusted the chattel and delegated any part of that duty of care. In general, the party asserting the lien cannot charge the owner for the costs of keeping the chattel during the period of his possession by reason of the lien, and cannot add such costs to the charges in respect of which the lien is asserted."

7. This court, of course, does not know what the defendants' answer to that is.
8. The district judge was not referred to those actual passages, though the point was taken before him.
9. It was then appealed from him to Her Honour Judge Coates. She was referred to the passage from Chitty on Contracts. It is not quite clear to me what she made of it. Having set it out, she said this: "What that says inter alia is that the lien covers the sum due for materials supplied and work performed on the chattel, but not charges for warehousing and storage even during the period of the lien. Therefore, to allow that effectively to happen, which is what has happened as the result of the judgment, I accept, is an appeal point and that would be wrong."
10. However, having made the order she did, she said this:

"That is not an end of the matter, and I make it perfectly clear, because they still have a judgment for £3,392 storage charges, which they can pursue against Mr Morris and no doubt they will. That has not gone out of the window."

11. Therefore, the judgment in relation to that sum still stands against Mr Morris.
12. It is clear that, not only is this a second tier appeal, but it is also an appeal from the Small Claims Court, where the right of appeal is limited, for relevant purposes, to points of law. This does seem to me to be a point of law which there are compelling reasons to hear, because it seems at first blush as though the courts below might have been wrong about it.
13. For those reasons, therefore, I give Mr Morris permission to appeal. I am not intending to limit that permission in any way: that is to say, Mr Morris should be entitled to pursue his appeal as it was made to the district judge. That was a document that Mr Morris could not refer me to today; hence I have expressed my judgment in the way that I have.
Order: application for permission to appeal granted.