Law digest: 8 December 2023

Damages

Holmes v Poeton Holdings Ltd [2023] EWCA Civ 1377, [2023] All ER (D) 129 (Nov)

The Court of Appeal, Civil Division, allowed the appellant’s appeal from a decision which had determined that the appellant was liable to the respondent for all the consequences of his having contracted Parkinson’s disease. The respondent was a valued employee of the appellant. Later, the respondent was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He filed an action and claimed damages from the appellant because it acted in breach of its common law and statutory duty in the period from 1982 to 1997 by exposing him to unsafe levels of trichloroethylene (TCE) in the course of his employment. The appellant alleged, among other things, that: (i) the judge had adopted the wrong legal test for establishing causation of what was acknowledged on all sides to be an ‘indivisible disease’; (ii) the judge misunderstood the evidence before him in assessing whether exposures to TCE in excess of occupational exposure limits occurred; and (iii) the finding of individual causation