Limitation is the first thing you look at on a new file and the last thing you want to get wrong. Miss it and the defendant acquires a complete statutory defence before the merits are ever considered, the claim is gone, and the negligence claim that follows is against you. Nicky Carter, who has spent a long career in personal injury and mostly on the claimant side, works through the whole picture: where the clock starts, what moves it, and what to do when it has already run out.
There is a substantial piece of news in this session. Section 96 of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 came into force on 29 June 2026 and has restructured the Limitation Act 1980. New sections 11ZA and 11ZB abolish the three year limit altogether for personal injury claims arising from child sexual abuse, reverse the burden of proof so the defendant must show a fair trial is impossible, and apply retrospectively. The session explains what the change does, what it pointedly does not do, and how it shifts the whole battleground onto vicarious liability.
Around that sits the everyday material: accrual of the cause of action, the three limbs of section 14 knowledge and the hard edge of constructive knowledge, children and protected parties under section 28, the two clocks in fatal claims, the full list of section 33 factors, standstill agreements and why they are a matter of contract rather than statute, and the service traps under CPR 7.5 and rule 7.4 that turn a protective claim form into a struck out claim.
Key Takeaways
- What the 2026 amendments do: zero limitation bar for child sexual abuse claims, a reversed burden of proof, retrospective effect, and the estate exclusion that still forces personal representatives back to section 33
- Why the physical abuse and neglect claims sitting beside a sexual abuse claim stay on the old regime, and how that splits the court's fair trial assessment within a single case
- How section 14 knowledge is built from significance, attribution and identity, and why the claimant does not need to know the defendant was negligent
- The constructive knowledge trap: the court will fix a claimant with the answer to a question they never asked, from the date a reasonable person would have asked it
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