Cases - Nye Saunders v Alan E Bristow

Record details

Name

Nye Saunders v Alan E Bristow

Date

(1987)

Citation

37 BLR 92

Keywords

Contract administration

Summary

The claimant architects were engaged by the defendant to prepare and submit a planning application for proposed renovation of his substantial house. The defendant informed the architects that he had about £250,000 available to spend on the project. The defendant asked the architects to provide a written estimate of the likely costs of the works. The architects employed a quantity surveyor and sent to the claimant an estimate of £238,000 based on the latter's work. However, the quantity surveyor had failed to allow for increases caused by inflation or contingencies and the architects failed to point that out to the defendant.

Subsequently, when planning permission had been obtained and the initial design work progressed, it became apparent that the estimated cost of the project had escalated sharply to £440,000. The defendant cancelled the project, terminated the architects' employment and refused to pay their fees.

The architects' action to recover their fees was dismissed on the ground that they had failed in their duty to the defendant to take reasonable care in providing the projected estimate of costs. The Court of Appeal held:

• the cause of the increase in costs was inflation, about which the architects had failed to warn the defendant;
• since as at February 1974, it was not an accepted practice amongst a reasonable body of architects to avoid giving a warning as to inflation when providing an approximate estimate of a project's costs, the architects had been negligent;
• while it was acceptable and even prudent for the architects to consult a quantity surveyor to help provide the estimate, they could not avoid responsibility for their failure to draw the attention of the employer to the fact that the estimate did not take into account the likely effects of inflation;
• the duty to warn the employer of those effects rested on the architects and could not be avoided by passing it on to the quantity surveyor.