Account for staff time in breaches of contract

摘要

Dealing with the fallout from a breach of contract can be difficult. For the victim, fixing the problem can be time-consuming and costly, particularly if it means taking staff off productive work to get things back on track. But to what extent can the victim recover these staff costs from the contract breaker? The courts were recently faced with this very question. A company called Azzurri bought 1,077 phones from SOS to meet an order from the AA for its UK call centres, but a number of the phones turned out to be faulty - some would cut off for no reason. Azzurri replaced all the phones with a new batch from a different supplier and then claimed the replacement costs from SOS. It also claimed "internal business costs" - the costs of the time staff spent investigating the problem and replacing the phones.