Cases - Farley v Skinner
Record details
- Name
- Farley v Skinner
- Date
- [2001]
- Citation
- 48 EG 131
- Legislation
- Keywords
- Negligence in valuations and surveys
- Summary
-
The defendant surveyor was instructed to inspect a country house for a prospective purchaser and was specifically asked to investigate whether the property was affected by aircraft noise. He negligently failed to do so, and the claimant purchaser found that his enjoyment of the property was indeed affected by such noise (although the amount of noise was not sufficient to affect the value of the property). The House of Lords held that this was one of the exceptional cases in which an important object of the contract was to provide pleasure; the defendant was accordingly liable to pay damages (assessed at £10,000) for the fact that the purchaser suffered exactly the kind of displeasure he had tried to avoid. Alternatively, the House of Lords held that the noise in question could be regarded as a sufficiently physical interference to be treated as 'inconvenience and discomfort'.