Architect’s Responsibility For Latent Defects

Originally published in The Insurance Law Quarterly: Winter 2005

Pearson concerned a warehouse constructed in the late 1980s with a siphonic drainage system which, as it subsequently transpired, had been designed with an inadequately low capacity. As a result, the valley gutters to the warehouse overflowed during heavy rain in 2002, and the claimant suffered in excess of £2 million of damage to its stock of educational books.

Pearson was not itself the original owner or occupier of the building, and so, following Baxall v Sheard Walshaw Partnership (2002) (a case also concerned with the under-capacity of siphonic drainage systems), Pearson could only claim against the architects responsible for negligently specifying the capacity of the drainage system insofar as the defect was latent. As established in Baxall, in the construction context a defect will not be latent where " in the normal course of events, a surveyor would be engaged in a survey of a