A carelessly-driven 4 × 4 stove in a venerable Ford Granada parked at the roadside on Canvey Island. The Granada’s owner, unwilling to remain in forced immobility while his car was being repaired but not having the ready cash available to hire another one, invoked the aid of Helphire. Like other credit hire companies, Helphire operated by seeking out accident victims with cast-iron claims for damages, hiring them cars on a credit basis without any need for immediate payment, pursuing the insurers of the responsible motorists for replacement hire costs, and thereby recouping their own charges directly from the sums recovered. Not surprisingly in the light of the fact that they were effectively providing free credit and legal services to their clients as well as the use of a car, their charges for car hire (in Lagden , some £660 for 10 days or so) were considerably above what other companies charged.

In Lagden , as in the previous credit hire cases such as Dimond v. Lovell ,3 Helphire were trying in their clients’ name to recover these charges from the defendant’s insurers. The question, again as in Dimond , was whether the latter were liable for £660 or merely for whatever lesser sum would have been charged by an ordinary car hire firm. One might have thought that this point had been pre-empted by Dimond , where the House of Lords had sided with the insurers on fairly similar facts. But there was a distinction between the two cases. In Dimond the claimant, had she been so inclined, could have hired cheaply in the market rather than use expensive credit hire (or at least nobody had suggested the contrary). But in Lagden it was accepted on all sides that, because of the claimant’s cash-flow difficulties, he could not have hired at all except by using the premium service provided by Helphire and others of that kidney. Helphire naturally argued that this made all the difference. Since in incurring the cost of £660 the claimant had acted not only reasonably but effectively under compulsion (assuming he exercised his right to a replacement car at all), this was an expense he must be able to recover from the defendant. The Court of Appeal agreed,4 distinguishing Dimond on this basis. The insurers appealed, saying that to make them pay the full sum was triply unacceptable. First, although their customer had disabled Mr Lagden’s car and thus admittedly had to pay the cost of a temporary replacement, his liability was for a reasonable hire charge and

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