Lukins v Quality Part X: when does failure to e-file prevent a claim being "brought" in time?

A fire at Wembley Commercial Centre on 6 April 2018 destroyed business and personal possessions belonging to the claimants, Richard Lukins and Alison Griffiths. Nearly six years later, their solicitors sent hard copies of a claim form to the King's Bench Division by special delivery. The envelope arrived on 26 March 2024 — ten days before the limitation period expired. The court returned the documents, pointing out that electronic filing had been mandatory for legally represented parties since 1 July 2019 under CPR PD 51O. The claim was eventually issued electronically on 9 April 2024, three days after the limitation period had run out.

The defendants applied for summary judgement on the grounds that the claims were statute-barred under section 2 of the Limitation Act 1980.

The legal framework

The central question was when proceedings are "brought" for the purposes of the 1980 Act. CPR PD 7A §6.1 provides that where a claim form is received in the court office on a date earlier than the date of issue, the claim is treated as "brought" on that earlier date. The claimants argued this provision applied here: the claim form had been received on 26 March 2024, within time.

Deputy Master Skinner KC was unpersuaded. Drawing on the Court of Appeal's decisions in Barnes v St Helens MBC [2007], Page v Hewetts Solicitors [2012], Butters v Hayes [2021], Chelfat v Hutchison 3G UK Ltd [2022] and Guo v Kinder [2024], she distilled a clear principle: a claim is brought in time only where the claimant has done at least all that could reasonably be expected to ensure proceedings are issued before limitation expires. The corollary is that a claimant does not bear the risk of court-side delays — but equally cannot shelter behind the rule where the delay is attributable to their own non-compliance.

Electronic filing had not been a novel requirement. CPR PD 51O had made it mandatory for legally represented parties for over five years. The solicitors' failure to use CE-File was, in the Deputy Master's assessment, plainly unreasonable, and the claim was therefore not "brought" on 26 March 2024.

The claimants' arguments, and why they failed

The claimants advanced several alternative arguments. They contended that court staff had no power to reject the claim form and should either have issued it or converted the paper documents to PDF format themselves. They relied by analogy on R (Karen Lawrence) v London Borough of Croydon [2024] and Cala Homes v Chichester DC, in which claims sent to the wrong court office had nonetheless been treated as validly filed.

The Deputy Master distinguished both cases. Neither involved a claim form that had been returned. More fundamentally, in Karen Lawrence the judge had not been taken to the full line of Court of Appeal authority, and had applied Barnes narrowly without asking whether the claimant's conduct was reasonable. On the facts, the outcome in Karen Lawrence was defensible — the litigant had done all that could reasonably be expected of her in the circumstances — but its reasoning could not assist where a solicitor had simply ignored a well-established procedural requirement.

The argument that litigants in person could have filed by post, and that the same analysis should therefore apply to represented parties, was similarly rejected. A litigant in person sending a claim form by post would be following a method expressly permitted by the rules. A solicitor doing the same thing would be contravening a mandatory obligation of five years' standing. The distinction is material.

CPR 3.10

The claimants' fallback position — that the court could remedy the error under CPR 3.10 — also failed. That rule operates where an error of procedure occurs during existing proceedings. No proceedings were extant at the time the solicitors sent the paper claim form. As the Deputy Master noted, the six-year limitation bar is set by primary legislation and cannot be abrogated by a rule of court.

Summary judgement was entered for both defendants. The decision reinforces that the risk-allocation principles underlying Barnes cut both ways: a claimant who has not taken the steps required of a reasonably competent solicitor cannot expect the court to absorb the consequences. The mandatory e-filing regime is now permanent under CPR PD 5C, which replaced PD 51O on 1 October 2025. This judgement is a timely reminder that compliance with the requirement is a precondition to the protection afforded by PD 7A §6.1, not an optional formality.

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