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	England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions
You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions >> Bright v Pittock [2001] EWCA Civ 755 (16 May 2001) URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2001/755.html Cite as: [2001] EWCA Civ 755

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IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM CANTERBURY COUNTY COURT
(HIS HONOUR JUDGE POULTON)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand London WC2 Wednesday, 16th May 2001

Wednesday, 16th May 2001

1. LORD JUSTICE LONGMORE: This is an application for permission to appeal by Mrs Bright from a decision of His Honour Judge Poulton in the Canterbury County Court given on 10th October 2000.
2. The position is that Mrs Bright was involved in a car accident in which the defendant, Mr Pittock, was the driver. She claimed that she sustained a whiplash injury in that accident which has effectively disabled her from having an ordinary life and that was the basis on which she claimed damages. Most unfortunately from Mrs Bright's point of view, and very surprisingly in one sense because the coincidence of this must be quite rare, just a month before the accident with which her claim was concerned, she had suffered a similar accident, found by the judge not to be as severe as the second accident, in which the same type of injury arose.
3. One of the things that the action investigated was the extent to which the injury in the second accident had or had not been exacerbated by or, indeed, itself had not exacerbated the injury in the first accident. The first accident which was less severe was with a Parcel Force van and there were proceedings as a result of that incident against the proprietors of Parcel Force and they were settled for a modest sum of money.
4. The applicant represented herself at the trial because although she had initially instructed solicitors they came off the record in December of 1999. I understand that Mrs Bright has complaints against those solicitors, but those of course are not material for my decision on this application. The result of the case was that His Honour Judge Poulton awarded damages to the applicant in respect of the whiplash injury she sustained in that accident in the sum of something over £9,000. That was as a result of an extended consideration of the medical evidence before him and also of evidence which has been described in the papers as video evidence taken of Mrs Bright on three separate occasions. Although he accepted that she did sustain whiplash injuries as a result of the second accident, the relatively modest sum which he awarded reflected his conclusion that she sustained some other injury after the accident because her continuing complaints were not made out as having been caused by that second accident. There was a plethora of medical expert evidence, and the judge considered that evidence with considerable care. But in the end he decided the important matters of the case, as far as the quantum of damages was concerned, by saying this:

"I am quite unable to accept I am afraid that this Claimant has been disabled in the way in which she contends. Of course I am influenced, as the Doctors are in these proceedings, by the video."

5. There are, I think it is fair to say, eight substantial grounds of appeal which Mrs Bright wishes to pursue. She says, firstly, that it was unfair for the trial to proceed because she did not have a solicitor and not had sufficient opportunity to obtain another one; secondly, she says she had no idea how she should go about calling witnesses and she had hoped and expected that the Court would do that for her; thirdly, that the judge carried on part of the case without her, when she was ill, and she adds to that her strong feeling that the hearing was an unfair one. That is really a separate fourth ground of appeal because she asserts that the judge made it plain that he thought she ought not to be representing herself, and she submits that his approach to her betrayed an inappropriate sexism.
6. Fifthly, she says that she never got to the trial bundle properly in time to prepare for the hearing; sixthly, she says there were some matters of detail that His Honour Judge Poulton was wrong about in his judgment; seventhly, she says that it was not right that the psychologist instructed by the defendant should have been present in the court and able to hear the witnesses giving their evidence because he then had an excellent opportunity to prepare himself for the questions that Mrs Bright was likely to put to him. Eighthly, she says that the judge dismissed the evidence of the pain consultant too derisorily, that is Dr Buists, and she also complains that Dr Murray, another doctor, did not come to court although he had examined her.
7. Having considered these grounds of appeal, I take the view that those complaints, centring as they do, on the way that the trial was conducted by the judge are in the scheme of the case as a whole so minor as to not give ground for any argument that there would be any real prospect of appeal. The judge clearly did consider the medical evidence very carefully and devotes a large part of the judgment to that. He says in his judgment that Mrs Bright represented herself with some skill, and I have been able to observe that skill for myself today.
8. There is, however, one ground which has given me pause for consideration; that is the fact, which I have already mentioned, that there was a time in the course of the trial when there arose a question whether the case should continue in Mrs Bright's absence, particularly at the time when the defendant's orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Taor, had to give his evidence. On the day that he came to give his evidence, Mrs Bright was unfortunately ill. Her husband appeared and asked for an adjournment so that the matter could proceed with Mrs Bright being able to cross-examine Dr Taor on another occasion. That of course did put the judge into a very difficult position. The timing of the case had been arranged for the availability of the medical witnesses. It is always something of a triumph of organisation when a Court case does take place and the doctors are all able to be present. If the learned judge had acceded to the application for an adjournment so that Dr Taor came back on another day and Mrs Bright were to cross-examine him on that other day, that would have necessitated quite a lengthy adjournment because of Dr Taor's commitments; that would not have been in the interests of the case as a whole. The judge was certainly very exercised about that and in his judgment he says this:

"... it was unfortunate that when Dr Taor gave his evidence she was unable to be here. On that occasion I was faced with an application made on her behalf by her husband that the application be adjourned. I declined to do that partly because if it was adjourned Mr Taor would have to have come back and a date to get him back would have been way in the future. It is always difficult to set up cases in which there are a lot of Doctors and this case certainly had a lot of doctors. That would have meant a long adjournment in a case that was already getting on for seven and a half years. So I declined that adjournment and it did mean that Dr Taor was not cross-examined. If there had been a serious disagreement between the doctors on the two sides I do not think I could have continued with the case but in fact there was not a serious disagreement between the Doctors and the two sides."

9. Mrs Bright says to me this morning that that is wrong because there was a serious disagreement. The position about that appears to be that there was a disagreement between Dr Taor and Mr Noordeen, the consultant orthopaedic surgeon instructed by Mrs Bright on her own behalf, and that disagreement emerged in a joint medical report that was before the court in relation to the opinions of those doctors. Mr Noordeen said that he felt that the second injury was responsible for the majority of Mrs Bright's symptoms; Dr Taor felt that the first injury was more significant as she went to the local accident and emergency department on that occasion, whereas she had not on the second occasion. That is certainly quite a significant difference of opinion but in fact the judge accepted Mr Noordeen's view that, as between the two accidents, the second injury was responsible for the majority of the symptoms. So to that extent Mrs Bright may even have been advantaged by the fact that the judge took into account the fact that she had not been able to cross-examine Dr Taor.
10. The other matter in which there was quite a difference of opinion between Mr Noordeen and Dr Taor was that Dr Taor said that Mrs Bright had more or less recovered from the injuries sustained in the second accident within six months, and that subsequent symptoms, pain and disability, were not a consequence of the injuries sustained in that accident or even in the first accident, whereas Mr Noordeen took the view that Mrs Bright's continuing symptoms were genuine, and he said that there was a group of patients who did continue to have residual symptoms in the kind of situation in which Mrs Bright found herself.
11. That is, of course, a difference of opinion. But the judge did not find it necessary to resolve that difference of opinion by reference to Dr Taor's evidence. As I indicated, in the end he resolved the case by reference to the evidence of the videos which he had seen, and of course he had a certain amount of assistance in that respect, as I have already indicated, from the evidence of other doctors given in relation to those videos. Although it is an unusual feature of the case, and indeed a regrettable one, that part of the evidence had to take place in the absence of Mrs Bright, the evidence that was given was not in any way crucial to the judge's decision. I therefore have to conclude that there is no real prospect of an appeal in this case and refuse permission to appeal. That, of course, says nothing about any complaint that Mrs Bright may or may not have against her solicitors.
(Application for permission to appeal refused)