Walls – as a principle, they’re there to protect us from danger. But if they are not safe, they can quickly become a danger. Common examples of accident claims involving walls could be as follows:
- A piece of a wall falls off and hits you / a wall collapses on you.
- A low wall you are sitting on collapses or breaks beneath you.
- A wall is dangerously low causing a trip and / or fall over it.
- A wall you are leaning on collapses or breaks, causing an accident.
So if any of the above happens to you, can you make a claim for personal injury compensation?
Your Rights
Normally this will fall within the scope of the Occupiers Liability Act, whether it’s a wall owned privately by a person or a company, or whether its public land. There isn’t necessarily a duty to inspect walls, as you’d probably expect them to be alright. But there is a duty to ensure no-one is injured by them, so there is a duty to maintain them.
Whether you have a claim will probably come down to whether whoever is in charge of the wall had, or ought to have had, reasonable knowledge that the wall could be a danger. Examples of this could be as follows:
- Someone reports that a wall looks damage or unstable and nothing is done about it.
- Employees of a company walk past a wall everyday and would likely spot a problem if it was noticeable – but haven’t.
- A landlord or agency inspecting a house in general that is rented should probably ensure that the house is in a stable condition.
- If there has been some kind of problem like a leak or a crash where the wall was involved, and its structure could therefore have been compromised, an inspection ought to take place.
Thankfully it’s kind of rare for people to be injured by walls unless something like a crash happens where it’s likely that the wall could have become dangerous. But if nothing is done when they knew, or ought to have known, of a potential danger, that’s when you may have a winning claim for personal injury compensation.
