UK Trends and Developments Contributed by: Lisa Lunt and Sarah Samuel, Fletchers Solicitors
The difficulty is that, in the defective product context, the UK’s ten-year period is often disconnected from the lived reality of injury, diagnosis and attribution, so finality is purchased at the cost of denying compensa - tion to people who could not reasonably have sued earlier and are now time-barred from doing so. First, the longstop clock starts before the claimant’s injury pathway even begins. It runs from when the product is first put into circulation, not from implanta - tion, prescription, purchase, first use, or first injury. For products with long distribution life cycles – stockpiled medical devices, medicines held in hospital supply chains, or components used years after manufacture – the longstop can be substantially “used up” before the product reaches the end user. Second, latent harm is common. Some defects do not cause immediate, obvious injury; they cause progres - sive deterioration, delayed complications, or subtle symptoms that are initially treated as unrelated con - ditions. Even once symptoms appear, establishing a causal link to a particular product can require spe - cialist diagnosis, access to medical records, product identification (serial/batch tracing), and sometimes regulatory findings or emerging scientific literature. These steps rarely fit comfortably within a rigid ten- year extinction window. Medical devices illustrate the point starkly. An implant may be manufactured and released into circulation, then stored on a hospital shelf and later implanted; the patient may live with it for years before a problem becomes clinically apparent; and further time may pass before a clinician suspects a device-related injury, investigations are completed, and the patient receives advice that prompts a claimant to obtain legal advice. At that point, the claimant can discover that the CPA route is already time-barred, often before they even knew there was a potential claim. Third, the longstop can operate harshly for vulnerable claimants, including those injured as children. While the Limitation Act contains protective rules in other contexts (for example, delaying the time limit until a child reaches adulthood for certain claims), the CPA longstop is designed to be absolute. The outcome can be that an injured person reaches adulthood only
to find that the strict liability claim has already been extinguished because the product entered circulation more than ten years earlier. These features make it much harder for injured peo - ple to get justice. A strict longstop can stop group claims from ever building momentum (because many potential claims have already expired before claim - ants speak to a lawyer), weaken claimants’ bargain - ing position (defendants can point to limitation rather than address whether the product was defective), and sends the wrong message: that if harm takes years to show up, the producer may never have to take accountability for it by virtue of the fact that the long - stop limitation has expired. The case for a 25-year longstop: aligning limitation with the realities of long-latency injuries Extending the longstop limitation period to 25 years, at least for latent personal injury, would not impose unlimited liability. Instead, it would better balance final - ity and fairness by recognising that (i) claimants can - not control when an injury emerges or is diagnosed, and (ii) there is a pronounced information asymmetry in product cases, where crucial safety data, internal testing, and post-market surveillance are held by producers and regulators rather than those who are injured. Furthermore, the absence of a comprehensive regis - ter for the vast majority of medical products signifi - cantly impedes the early detection of product failures. This gap not only obstructs effective monitoring and reporting but also contributes to a broader lack of knowledge and awareness within the medical com - munity, whereby harm caused to patients may not be readily recognised as stemming from the medical product itself. The New PLD’s move to a 25-year longstop for latent personal injury reflects an EU-level judgment that ten years is too short in at least some categories of harm. Whatever view is taken of broader EU reforms, this particular adjustment is targeted: it focuses on late- manifesting injury, where the moral and social case for compensation is strongest and where strict time bars are most likely to be unfair.
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