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About the project The Singapore Academy of Law’s Law Reform Committee recommended that the Limitation Act (Chapter 163, 1985 Revised Edition; currently the 1996 Revised Edition) be revised due to a judgment of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom relating to the British legislation on which Singapore’s Act was based. In Pirelli General Cable Works v Oscar Faber and Partners [1983] 2 AC 1, the House of Lords had held that a cause of action accrued as soon as a wrongful act had caused personal injury beyond what could be regarded as negligible, even when that injury was unknown to and could not be discovered by the sufferer. Under the Singapore Limitation Act as it then stood, the limitation period started running from the time the action accrued. Thus, there was a real likelihood that an injured person’s right of action in cases of latent damage might become time-barred before the person knew or could have known about the damage. In the Pirelli judgment, the House of Lords had said that the legal position was “harsh and absurd” and that it was “unjustified in principle that a cause of action should be held to accrue before it was possible to discover the damage”. The Court thus recommended that legislation be enacted to overcome this undesirable state of affairs. The UK Parliament subsequently passed the Latent Damage Act 1986 (1986 chapter 37) to remove the problem. The Law Reform Committee recommended that the Singapore Act should similarly be amended along the lines of the Latent Damage Act (UK) and the Limitation Act 1980 (1980 chapter 58; UK). Project status: Completed
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Areas of law Click on the image above to view the paper |