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The plaintiff purchaser of a house was required to pay for a surveyor's valuation for the purpose of a mortgage application. The defendant surveyor was acting for the building society mortgagee to enable it to determine whether the property provided adequate security for the loan. The plaintiff detrimentally relied on the valuation in her decision to buy the house, which lost value soon after her purchase due to faulty construction work. She sued the surveyor for damages. The House of lords held that the defendant surveyor owed a duty of care to the intending purchaser who, as he knew, would rely upon his valuation without obtaining an obtaining an independent survey. Even though the contract was between the building society and surveyor, it was reasonably foreseeable that the purchaser would rely on his skill and judgment in the matter. Hence, the surveyor could be liable in negligence when his valuation turned out to be considerably off the mark. Moreover, the court stated that an attempt by the surveyor to disclaim liability for negligence was only effective to the extent that it complied with the reasonableness test in the Unfair Contract Terms Act (1977). But because the purchaser, much like a majority of those buying a house, could not afford an independent valuation, the surveyor's disclaimer in this case was unreasonable and thus null and void.

Note that the court's judgment left open the possibility that a surveyor's disclaimer of liability in such circumstances might still apply to commercial property or houses at the more expensive end of the market, where the purchaser might be viewed as capable of paying for his own independent valuation. Note as well the contrast between the court's decision in this instance with decisions in cases involving company auditors: in the latter, the scope of the duty is generally restricted to situations that fall within the purpose for which the auditor provides information (as, for example, in Caparo Industries v Dickman (1990), whereas in the former, a duty may be owed to the purchaser of a house even though the primary purpose of the valuation was to enable the lender to decide whether to advance a loan. The justification of this exception is that surveyors are paid for their services at the purchaser's expense and must know that, in the case of a typical house purchase, the buyer will have little choice but to rely upon his valuation. Significantly, this exception appears to be confined to the party purchasing the house at the time the valuation is performed, and does not extend to subsequent purchasers of the property.

This discrepancy is in itself significant for what it tells us about the law's evolving treatment of negligent misstatement and pure economic loss. As a general matter, the courts have displayed an abundance of caution when it comes to possibly burdening the defendant with 'liability in an indeterminate amount for an indeterminate time to an indeterminate class' and the attendant risk of opening the 'floodgates' to future such legal action (as Cardozo CJ famously put it in the U.S. tort law case on negligent misstatement, Ultramares Corporation v Touche (1931)). While attempts have been made to establish broad principles for the purpose of establishing the potential range of claimants and the circumstances in which their claims will be heard, this has met with only limited success. Rather, the courts have found it intellectually more satisfying to begin with a relatively narrow reading of the scope of the Hedley Byrne principle (i.e. that a duty of care can exist in the context of a 'special relationship' between two parties where one has suffered pure economic loss in connection with the other's negligent misstatement) and approach the question of justifiable expansion on a strictly case by case basis. Hence, it is not surprising that such differences have emerged, as the courts have come to identify discrete categories of liability under the broad heading of negligent misstatement.

See also Hedley Byrne v Heller (1963), Caparo Industries v Dickman (1990).