Matthew's Journal

This is the story of my first County Court hearing. We bought a car in November 2017, subject to service and 3 months' warranty. At the end of part one, it was late March 2018, we were £1.3k out of pocket, and Cross. By the end of part two, we'd spent £195 in court fees, and killed a lot of trees. Yesterday was the day of the hearing; atreic and I had taken half a day off work, and diziet was coming along for moral support (and to whisper hints). I'd had a rubbish night's sleep and was Quite Anxious.

Things got off to an inauspicious start when the court staff decided my bike pump and repair kit might be weapons and said I couldn't bring them in. Thankfully they have a facility of keeping hold of items for you, but it was still a bit surprising! We were there in plenty of time, so had to sit around and wait. And wait.

Nationwide had sent a Proper Barrister (I looked them up afterwards; they're doing their pupillage, so quite a new barrister, but still); they worked out who we were and came over to give us their skeleton argument. This was Quite Alarming - it made reference to the garage's terms and conditions, which we'd never seen before! It also said that we'd made heavy use of the car, so everything was wear and tear and the car couldn't have possibly have been unroadworthy when sold; that no-one expects 8yo cars to have working cruise control; that the warranty only applies to engine and gearbox.

About 10:15 we were called in. It became clear that the garage hadn't showed up; Nationwide's lawyer (hereafter NW for brevity) briefly wondered if he was also meant to be acting for the garage. There then followed two quite intense hours.

Firstly, there was the business of the garage's late submission; the judge had only got it the previous day, but decided to admit it as evidence so as to try and give the garage a fair hearing. I started by outlining our case (I'd prepared for how I was going to do this), and then the judge took me through my witness statement (I should have, it turns out, included a signed copy in the bundle, but this didn't really matter), and asked me a few questions about it, particularly about what I understood by "subject to service", what we used the car for (long journeys, hence cruise control being important), and the (mis-)behaviour of the cruise control. Then NW got to question me; he was about to start on the T&Cs of the garage's warranty, when I said we'd never seen them, and the judge said he'd never seen them, they weren't in the bundle, and so he wasn't going to allow them as evidence. That did flummox NW briefly, but then he moved on; he only asked me a few questions, which surprised me. The reasons for this were to become clear.

Then atreic gave their evidence. Again, the judge took her through the statement first and asked a few questions, then asked NW if they had any. It became clear that NW had concluded that atreic was a soft target. This was an error; as diziet said, atreic was rock hard, entirely unflappable, and didn't give an inch. NW's strategy was to take atreic back and forth through the bundle and keep asking questions like "surely you'd agree that most people wouldn't expect such an old car to have working cruise control?", "surely it's not fair for the garage to have to take to guarantee the entire car will work perfectly?", "you drove the car for well over 2000 miles, surely it can't not have been roadworthy?", and so on. He went on at her for quite some time, and didn't really make progress. It was clear he was going to go strongly on the supposed T&Cs, but kept coming back to "surely we can't expect a warranty to...", which I think he must have known was weak given no-one else had seen the T&Cs and they'd been disallowed as evidence.

NW got to sum up first. He tried quite hard, and is clearly a pretty effective speaker. His main point was that the car must have been roadworthy for us to drive it for 2k miles, that no-one expects "such an old car" to have working electronics and in any case cruise control is not a key part of the utility of a car; and that it was all wear and tear. Then I had to sum up, which I don't think I did desperately well, really. I'd made a list of things I wanted to say, though, which helped: the law says that ambiguous contracts have to be interpreted in the favour of the consumer, which means that the warranty has to be interpreted to mean that the vehicle was free of defects during the warranty period; that we specifically looked for cruise control given our usage pattern; that we'd had much older cars with perfectly functional cruise control; and that the CPR presumption that the car was faulty at point of sale was not overcome. I also re-iterated my point about the service (and how that meant the garage had to tell us of any faults, and that if we'd known how bad the car was we'd have not bought it or at least negotiated a lower price).

The judge thanked us for our contributions, and said we should wait outside, but not go far, as he expected to be about 10 minutes. We waited, and fretted. 10 minutes became half an hour, which felt like an absolute age, then we were called back in.

We don't get a text of the judgement (unlike in higher courts), only the resulting Order. So we all scribbled notes. The judge started by outlining the facts as he saw them. He praised my "decent evidence pack" particularly for an unrepresented party, and noted that the garage's statement was of limited evidential value, since the witness didn't attend to be cross-examined. He accepted that the garage had not provided us with the warranty T+Cs, and that the garage had agreed to service the vehicle. He described us as "entirely reliable historians", and noted that the cruise control was very important to us given the sort of driving we mostly do.

He summarised the garage's evidence as mostly a commentary on our evidence bundle; he noted that it says nothing about the conversations that took place around the purchase of the vehicle, nor of any work done apropos the service, nor why the invoice didn't say "oil change" if that was what was agreed. He noted that they were claiming that the faults were either outside the warranty or merely wear and tear.

He then went on to summarise the law involved (I resisted the temptation to shout "I don't care, just tell me who won already!"); the AA's summary in our bundle was accurate. He'd consulted Woodroffe & Lowe's Consumer Law and Practice, and Blackstone's Guide to the Consumer Rights Act 2015. I didn't take notes on the next bit, as he went through the relevant statutory framework.

Then we got to his findings of facts and conclusions.

He started with the tyres. He noted the dangerous fault was the crack to the inner sidewall, which would not have been visible without jacking the car up, so couldn't have been seen on inspection. This fault was in the structural integrity of the tyres, not mere wear and tear (indeed, the tread was still legal). Absent evidence from the defence, this had to be assumed to be present at purchase. That engaged the "safety" aspect in CRA s9(3)(d), so the defendant was in breach of contract. At this point I started to think things were going well.

He then turned to the cruise control. It was the sort of thing that might be excluded from a warranty, but there were no warranty terms. There was no evidence the garage had checked this before purchase, the claimants had noticed the fault almost immediately, so there was no way a "wear and tear" argument could succeed here - the presumption was that the fault was present at purchase. He then ranted a bit about how everyone gets tailgated on the motorway, and in the light of that the fault in the cruise control was dangerous - if you suddenly slow down in the outside lane of the motorway without showing any brake lights, then the idiot behind you might ram you. Here again the safety aspect of CRA s9(3)(d) was engaged. Cruise control is a routine feature of cars, this was not a low-end car, nor was it a particularly high-mileage vehicle, only 8 years old. The defendant provided no evidence to help here.

In the light of this, judgement was granted for the full amount of the claim (and NW was indemnified against the garage). I was refused FCC because I'm not a solicitor, but we did both get loss of earnings (I'd calculated my after-tax day-rate, and got 1/2 of that) even though we'd both taken TOIL or annual leave rather than unpaid leave. The judge agreed that the garage had been unreasonable per CPR 27.14(g), but said we couldn't claim for costs because we hadn't put the garage on notice in this regard (diziet suspects if we'd had a schedule of time/costs to produce at this point we might have done better).

So we have an order for the 1.3k of repairs, 195 of court fees, and 1/2 days' wages for myself and atreic to be paid in 21 days. I'm very pleased, and very relieved (and also happy that the judge thought I'd done the paperwork well!). It was a very stressful morning at the end of quite a drawn-out process, though...