Failure to advise of car hire options left Ms P in financial distress...
Ms P instructed the firm to pursue a personal injury claim after she was in a road traffic accident. Ms P got a hire vehicle through the firm which she used for just under 6 weeks. Ms P said she did not know how much it would cost and recalled being told that she would not need to pay towards the hire as the other side had accepted liability for the accident.
Later, although the other side were willing to settle, they only agreed to pay a proportion of the hire costs which were approximately £19,000 in total. The hire company started to pursue Ms P for payment which she had to defend in court. The hire company were successful in these proceedings, and costs were ordered against Ms P as a result.
Ms P complained that the firm had misled her into taking out the car hire.
We decided that the firm’s service was unreasonable.
The evidence showed that Ms P repeatedly expressed concern about the hire cost and the firm reassured her that she would not be liable for it. There was no evidence to show that Ms P was provided with information about the hire costs or the other choices available to her, including the options of arranging a hire vehicle through her insurer or the other side. Because of this, Ms P did not have enough information to make an informed decision about whether to proceed with hire through the firm.
We decided, on the balance of probabilities, that Ms P would not have signed the hire agreement or had costs ordered against her if she was provided with accurate information about the cost of the hire. She therefore would not have needed to defend herself in court against the hire company. We also recognised that Ms P would have been shocked to learn that she needed to pay the hire costs as the firm reassured her that this would not be the case. This had a long-term impact on Ms P’s wellbeing as she had experienced significant stress over several years due to the legal action the hire company took against her.
To put Ms P back in the position she would have been in had the service been reasonable, we proposed several types of remedies including payments from the firm to:
The firm and Ms P agreed to this outcome.
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