The High Court has backed a six‑and‑a‑half‑month basic‑rate hire and storage against an MIB appeal.
Handed down on December 2, 2025, the High Court in Birmingham dismissed the Motor Insurers Bureau’s appeal over two big-ticket items in a motor claim: the length of car hire and the storage bill after a 2019 crash involving an uninsured driver. Mr Justice Cavanagh kept the focus squarely on whether the trial judge’s mitigation findings were plainly wrong. He concluded they were not.
The claimant, Drewy Houston, was a passenger while his own 2008 Chevrolet Captiva—valued at £2,320 gross (£2,134.40 net of salvage)—was damaged in the collision. An engineer confirmed on June 17, 2019, that the vehicle was a write‑off. Houston hired a 2018 Mercedes GLA through Easidrive on a credit agreement at £224.29 per day (£1,570.03 per week), starting June 15 and running until December 28, 2019—197 days in total. He said he needed a vehicle for work and family life, and could not replace the Captiva until funds arrived. He received the pre‑accident value payment on December 18, 2019.
At first instance, Recorder Brown accepted that impecuniosity could not be relied upon to claim credit hire rates because Houston had not complied with a disclosure order. The order explicitly debarred impecuniosity “for the purposes of determining the appropriate rate of hire,” so the judge applied a basic hire figure. The MIB’s rates expert, Liam Davies, put the total basic hire cost for the same period at £40,918.34, which the Recorder adopted. She also allowed storage to the date of scrappage, awarding £4,159.20 on the lower of two invoices covering June 24 to November 4, 2019.
On appeal, the MIB argued the Recorder undervalued the disclosure default, misapplied mitigation, and reached a perverse conclusion by allowing a relatively expensive vehicle for more than six months and prolonged storage. It also pressed that impecuniosity should apply to both rate and duration.
The High Court rejected those arguments. Mr Justice Cavanagh held that the debarring order did exactly what it said: it barred reliance on impecuniosity for rate, not for duration. On the facts the Recorder was entitled to find Houston could not afford to buy a replacement until December 2019 and that the 197‑day hire - costed at the basic rate - was reasonable. The court emphasized the appellate standard: absent an error of law, mitigation findings stand unless plainly wrong. On storage, the Recorder was entitled to accept that Houston had nowhere to keep the written‑off car and to cap recovery at the lower invoice through scrappage in November.
Two practical points stand out for insurers. First, wording matters: narrowly drawn debarring orders may not shut down arguments on hire duration. Second, trial tactics count: no betterment case was advanced and, by closings, storage was not pressed beyond preferring the lower invoice. Those concessions shaped the outcome.
The result: appeal dismissed; the basic‑rate hire over 197 days and storage to November 4, 2019, were upheld.
