A group of London restaurant companies has been given 28 days to rescue an 8 million pound claim against their former insurance broker, after the High Court refused to throw the case out and refused summary judgment.
In MW Eat Limited and others v James Hallam Limited [2026] EWHC 2673 (BP), Deputy Master Valentine said the claim, which alleges professional negligence and breach of contract over business interruption cover arranged before the pandemic, can continue. The particulars are not yet precise enough. The claimants must amend them to explain the alternative policy they say should have been obtained, and which of their losses that policy would have paid.
The figures are the claimants' figures. They plead lost profits of about 8,022,528 pounds across the 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021/22 years, and damages not exceeding 8 million pounds. Nothing in today's ruling finds that the broker was negligent, or that any sum is due.
What the policy did and did not cover
MW Eat ran restaurants in London. When its previous cover expired in September 2019 it asked James Hallam about renewal. The broker approached several insurers and recommended an extended period with Barbican Protect. The company took a one-year policy from 20 September 2019 to 19 September 2020.
That policy included business interruption, with extensions for specified diseases and for non-damage denial of access. Covid-19, coronavirus and SARS were not on the specified-disease list. The disease extension had a maximum indemnity period of three months and a 50,000 pound limit for the year. The denial-of-access extension had the same three-month period and the same 50,000 pound cap. For the broker's application, both sides proceeded on the basis that the policy did not cover the pandemic losses beyond that limit, if it covered them at all.
Echowalk Limited and Echowalk Invest Limited sue with MW Eat. They are group companies and assignees of claims against the broker. The allegation is that inadequate disease cover, and inadequate cover for being shut by government order without physical damage, left the restaurants exposed when lockdown arrived. James Hallam asked the court to strike the claim out, or to give judgment now, on the ground that the case as pleaded could not succeed.
The Ruling, Without the Latin
- Case: MW Eat Limited and others v James Hallam Limited [2026] EWHC 2673 (BP).
- Strike-out refused. Summary judgment refused.
- Claimants have 28 days to amend the particulars of claim.
- They must identify the cover they say should have been arranged, and the losses recoverable under it.
- Pleaded losses are about 8.02 million pounds. The claim is capped at 8 million. Those sums are allegations, not an award.
Why the pleading was not good enough, and why the case survives
A professional negligence claim against a broker is not a claim on the policy. The restaurants have to show what a competent broker would have advised, what cover was available in the market in 2019, and what that cover would have paid when restaurants were ordered to close in 2020. The court found that the hypothetical policy, and the route from that policy to the pleaded losses, had not been set out with enough precision to let the broker know the case it had to meet.
That is a pleading defect, not a finding that no such policy existed. By refusing to strike the claim out, Deputy Master Valentine has left the restaurants a path, on a short clock. If the amended particulars still do not identify a real alternative and a real loss, the broker can come back. If they do, the case moves towards evidence: what was quoted in September 2019, what MW Eat was told, and what a disease extension bought that autumn would actually have been worth in a pandemic nobody had underwritten as Covid-19.
Business interruption litigation has been running since the first lockdown. Most of the early cases were against insurers, on wording the Supreme Court split in the test case. Broker claims are the next layer: not "does this clause respond?" but "should a different clause have been in the folder?" They are slower, more factual, and harder to win, because the claimant has to rebuild a market that no longer exists.
For readers following the Journal's law list, this sits in a different drawer from yesterday's unduly lenient sentence and from the black-cab claims against Uber that failed on time limits. It is a commercial case about how clearly a loss has to be pleaded before a defendant is put to the cost of a trial. The 28 days start now.