Admiralty – Limitation of liability – Marina – Statutory provision allowing dock owners to limit liability for loss or damage to vessel – Respondent owner of marina made up of floating pontoons seeking to limit liability following storm damage to craft moored in marina – High Court holding floating pontoons properly described as landing place, jetty or stage within section 191 of Merchant Shipping Act 1995 – Appellants appealing – Whether respondent entitled to limit liability under section 191 – Appeal dismissed
In March 2018, Storm Emma hit Holyhead on the Isle of Anglesey from a north easterly direction. The respondent was the owner of the Holyhead Marina, which was located at the western end of the Holyhead outer harbour. Some 89 craft moored in the marina and the pontoons making up the marina were damaged.
The respondent brought proceedings against the appellant owners of the damaged craft, seeking a limitation of its liability pursuant to section 191 of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995 which provided that a dock included “wet docks and basins, tidal docks and basins, locks, cuts, entrances, dry docks, graving docks, gridirons, slips, quays, wharves, piers, stages, landing places and jetties”.
The judge held that it was not correct to say that, in the context of section 191, the marina was a dock within the ordinary meaning of that word, but that the pontoons which made up the marina were within the statutory definition of “dock”, being landing places, jetties or stages: [2020] EWHC 1750 (Admlty).
The appellants appealed. The question at the heart of the appeal was whether the respondent was the owner of a “dock” within the meaning of that word as it was used in section 191(1). If the marina was a dock (as the judge held), the appellant could limit its liability to 500,000 units of account, equating to some £550,000. If not, its unlimited liability could be as much as £5 million.
The appellants argued that the judge was wrong to take into account the fact that pleasure craft as well as commercial ships were entitled to limit their liability, when the types of structure listed in section 191(9) were all for use by commercial or passenger shipping and not, like marinas, for the mooring of pleasure craft.
Held: The appeal was dismissed.
(1) It was wrong to say, as the appellants had, that any concepts relating to the mooring of pleasure craft were notably absent from the statutory list. The judge was right to take into account the fact that pleasure craft as well as commercial ships were entitled to limit their liability. The types of structure listed in section 191(9) were not all purely commercial or passenger structures.
Although the marina was not a dock within the ordinary meaning of that term, the pontoons making up the marina properly fell within the wide meaning of the words “landing places”, “stages” and “jetties” as those terms were used in section 191(9). In relation to “landing places”, in ordinary usage the pontoons which made up the marina were both mooring places and landing places and that was sufficient to bring them within the ordinary meaning of “landing place”. Further, the marina itself was a landing place for the same reasons. There was no warrant for the restricted meaning advocated by the appellant owners who themselves accepted that the definition was wide.
If, as was accepted to be the case, the marina was used by the appellants to land passengers and crew, it was a landing place. The fact that a marina was a berthing place as well as a landing place did not mean that it was not a landing place. The fact that the pontoons making up the marina were accessed from the land by a movable bridge made no difference to the nature of the structure.
(2) The same reasoning applied to the judge’s approach to the question of whether the pontoons making up the marina fell within the other terms, namely piers, stages and jetties. Neither the pontoons nor the marina were properly to be regarded as piers but both the pontoons making up the marina and the marina itself were properly to be regarded as stages and jetties. The words were both of a very general character. Ultimately, terms as general as “landing place”, “stage” or “jetty” should not be construed so narrowly as to exclude either a collection of pontoons joined together to form a marina or the marina itself.
It was an undoubted fact that a collection of pontoons was plural and a marina was singular. However, it did not follow that a marina made up of a collection of individual pontoons could not form a single whole landing place, stage or jetty. Both the pontoons themselves and the marina as a whole fell within those terms in the definition.
(3) The relevant structure was the marina as a whole, just as would be the case with all the other structures mentioned in the definition. The marina as a whole was a landing place, even though the many constituent pontoons themselves making it up were also landing places. Section 191(3) made clear that the limitation of liability related to the whole of any losses and damages which might arise on any one distinct occasion. It would be absurd to construe the limit as applying to the constituent parts of a structure simply because both parts and the whole could properly be described as, for example, a landing place.
The legislation was a compromise between the two chief interests of dock owners and shipowners, with no suggestion that leisure craft owners were excluded from the latter category.
Even if this marina in particular and other marinas in general had insurance greater than the perceived limit in this case, that did not bear upon the correctness of that limit. Other situations in which section 191 operated had higher liability limits and, even if the market understanding were that section 191 did not apply to marinas, that understanding would be corrected once this case was determined.
(4) (per Males LJ) The meaning of terms such as “landing place” in the extended statutory definition of a “dock” had to be arrived at on common sense principles. They were not technical terms and there was a considerable overlap between them. The judge had reached a common sense conclusion which was clearly correct.
Nigel Cooper QC and James Watthey (instructed by Ince Gordon Dadds LLP) appeared for the appellants; Robert Thomas QC and Benjamin Coffer (instructed by Clyde & Co LLP) appeared for the respondent.
Eileen O’Grady, barrister
Click here to read a transcript of Holyhead Marina Ltd v Farrer and others
