What Is the Rule in Rylands v Fletcher?
Learn the rule in Rylands v Fletcher for A Level Law: when an escape from land creates strict liability, the key conditions, and a common exam mistake.
The rule in Rylands v Fletcher is that a person may be liable if they bring onto their land something likely to cause harm if it escapes, keep it there for an extraordinary or unusual use of the land, and it escapes and causes foreseeable damage to another person’s land or property. It is a form of strict liability: the claimant does not have to prove that the defendant was negligent.
What must the claimant show?
The defendant must have accumulated the thing on their land for their own purposes. It must then escape from land under the defendant’s control to land outside it. The use of the land must be non-natural, which in modern law means extraordinary or unusual in the circumstances, rather than an ordinary use of land. Finally, the type of damage caused by the escape must have been reasonably foreseeable.
For example, suppose a business stores an unusually large quantity of hazardous liquid on its land. A tank breaks, and the liquid flows onto a neighbour’s land, damaging the soil. If that storage counts as an extraordinary use of the land and the damage was foreseeable, the business may be liable even if it took reasonable care of the tank.
Liability is not automatic. Defences may apply, including where the escape was caused by an unforeseeable act of a third party or where the claimant consented to the accumulation.
Exam mistake to avoid: do not write that any escape creates liability. Apply each requirement to the facts, especially whether the use of land was extraordinary or unusual and whether the type of damage was foreseeable.
