‘[T]here are no winners here, only losers’

The Supreme Court recently handed down its decision in Guest v Guest [2022] UKSC 27. This was an appeal against an award in proprietary estoppel of around £1.3 million. A proprietary estoppel claim requires detrimental reliance on a promise to grant the claimant an interest in land. This generates an ‘equity’, which enables the court to fashion a remedy to cure this unconscionable situation: for example, an order to transfer the promised interest to the claimant, or an order to pay a monetary equivalent of what the claimant expected. The doctrine has been relied upon in media-friendly cases where claimants had worked on their family farms for low or no pay for many years on the expectation of an inheritance and ended up being cut out of that inheritance. Lord Briggs, for the majority, favoured enforcing the promise as a starting point while allowing for variation where ‘real-life problems’ warranted it. He held that the claimant should have what he expected but, in a novel approach, gave the defendants an entitlement to choose between two forms of relief. Lord Leggatt, dissenting, held that the remedial aim was to do only what was necessary to prevent detriment to the claimant. On his view, compensating the claimant’s reliance loss would be sufficient for this, and, in that regard, he did not factor in lost opportunities. This was a narrow scope to adopt, and the majority judgment is more likely to provide redress for the loss of important life opportunities.