Partial Admissions and Tactics for Allocation - Aidan Ellis, Temple Garden Chambers
25/07/14. In a claim for credit hire charges (or indeed any special damages) which slightly exceeds the small claims track limit, can the Defendant avoid the cost bearing fast track by making a tactical admission for part but not all of that item of special damage? That was the issue before the Court of Appeal in Akhtar v Boland [2014] EWCA Civ 872. In that case, the hire charges of around £5,200 would, together with other special damages, have pushed the claim into the fast track. The Defendant admitted around £2,000 of the hire charges and persuaded the Court to allocate to the small claims track. The Claimant appealed, arguing that (1) the purported admission was inconsistent with other paragraphs in the Defence which appeared to put need and enforceability in issue in relation to all of the hire charges and (2) a partial admission in relation to a head of loss should not have been taken into account for the purposes of allocation.
In a decision remarkable for the brevity of its reasoning, the Court of Appeal concluded that the effect of the admission was that the Claimant could do no worse at trial than the admitted sum of £2,000. The claim was therefore correctly allocated to the small claims track...
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