CL-2024-000457, 000458, 000459 - [2025] EWHC 1803 (Comm)

Order xiv, rule 1, required the plaintiff’s claim to have been for a “debt or liquidated demand in money” within what was then Order iii, rule 6. The ground of appeal was that, since no property had passed, the claim for the first instalment was not such a claim. The defendant relied on what it said had been the pleading rule that “Where a sum was payable by instalments an action of debt would not lie for one or more of the instalments before the whole was due” ([1908] 1 KB 970). It was said to follow that “There cannot be five actions of debt on one contract for the price of the same article” (ibid at 971). It was argued for the plaintiff that “an action of assumpsit was maintainable for one instalment of a sum payable by instalments under the old law where the debt would not lie” (ibid at 972), that therefore an action could be maintained for the first instalment alone, and “The Sale of Goods Act, 1893, s. 49, sub-s. 2, applies …” (ibid at 973). In reply, the only objection to the applicability of s.49(2) was an argument that it “only applies to an action for the whole of the price of goods”. (I think it is therefore not right to say, as the learned deputy judge did in CE Energy, supra, at [78], that neither side in Workman Clark argued that s.49 applied. The shipbuilder said that s.49(2) applied and the buyer joined issue on that but only on the ground, rejected by the court, that it did not apply to individual instalments where a price was payable in instalments.)