A Bedfordshire family has been unable to benefit from recent legislative changes to the duties of highway authorities to keep roads free from ice.
Three appeal judges have upheld a High Court decision to dismiss a compensation claim by the family of a Clophill man who was killed on an icy road near Turvey eight years ago.
May LJ said that, under laws at the time of the accident, the Department of Transport did not have a “general responsibility to all road users to ensure that all or any trunk roads would be salted in freezing conditions”.
Rather, he said, motorists had a “primary responsibility to take care for their own safety, and that of their passengers and fellow road users”.
The lord justice held that the family could not benefit from a Highways Act 1980 amendment that imposed a duty upon authorities to ensure that drivers were not endangered by snow or ice. The amendment came into force in October last year.
He said that the fact that parliament had imposed such a duty indicated that, without legislation, the duty would not be recognised in common law.
Peter Sandhar was 37 when he died after crashing his car on the A428 early one morning, just before Christmas in 1996.
His family sued the Department of Transport for £500,000 on the ground that it had negligently failed to arrange the salting of the road. Bedfordshire County Council is responsible for gritting the roads on behalf of the transport department.
In the High Court, Newman J said that council’s gritting had shown “serious shortcomings” when tested against the trunk roads maintenance manual.
However, he dismissed the family’s claim because, as the law then stood, they had no legal right to compensation.
In any event, he said, Sandhar was partly to blame for driving too fast in icy conditions.
Sandhar and another v Department of Transport, Environment and the Regions Court of Appeal (Brooke, May and Thomas LJJ) 5 November 2004.
John Ross QC and Sarah Paneth (instructed by Hawkins Russell Jones, of Hitchin) appeared for the appellants; Nigel Wilkinson QC and William Hoskins (instructed by the Treasury Solicitor) appeared for the respondent.
References: EGi Legal News 8/11/04
