Section 53 of the Marine Insurance Act 1906 is one of the subjects of the Law Commissions’ project on insurance law. The Commissions’ main proposals under s.53(1) are: to retain the direct liability of the broker to the underwriter in respect of premiums; to make it clear that the assured is also directly liable; and to limit the right of the broker to sue the assured to cases where he has actually paid the premium. It is argued that the first two of these suggestions is unexceptionable but the third is potentially problematical. As regards s.53(2), the Commissions wish to retain the broker’s lien, but to update it, remove any dependence on possession of a paper policy, and enact when the lien is a general one. In this piece it is suggested that these are fundamentally sound proposals, but that there may be easier ways of achieving them.

In a neat little vignette of life some 60 years ago, a perceptive historian once aptly described the then British railway system. A microcosm of a Britain that complacently refused to modernise, it was, he said, a kind of working museum of the nineteenth century, an “intricate cat’s cradle along which still puffed antique tank-engines pulling one or two equally antique carriages, Lincrusta-ceilinged, and now often empty or nearly so”.1 To many an intelligent insurance lawyer, there is a similar aura about the Marine Insurance Act 1906. It is at the same time an immensely solidly-built, carefully crafted code, and also a nostalgic reflection of long-forgotten commercial practices: witness the model policy appended to it, disused for decades, and the continuing legal requirement of a formal policy document that has been an tiresome irrelevance for something like 42 years since the abolition of stamp duty on insurance documents. In short, we have here an institution increasingly sidelined by a London market which—one suspects—prospers despite, rather than because of, its existence.2