Tort is the subject that lulls people into a false sense of security. You read about the snail in the ginger beer bottle, you nod along to "reasonable man", and you think: I've got this one. Then you sit a timed set of FLK1 questions and discover that four of the five options are legally defensible, the question is really about whether the claimant is a lawful visitor or a trespasser at 11pm on a Tuesday, and you've burned three minutes on a single item.
That gap — between understanding tort and being able to answer tort questions in 100 seconds — is where most FLK1 marks are quietly lost. This is a working revision guide to closing it, aimed at the three areas that generate the most confusion: the negligence chain, occupiers' liability, and pure economic loss.
Why tort punches above its weight on FLK1
SQE1 is two separate assessments. FLK1 covers Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution, Contract, Tort, the Legal System of England and Wales, Constitutional and Administrative Law including retained EU law, and Legal Services. FLK2 covers Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates, Solicitors Accounts, Land Law, Trusts, and Criminal Law and Practice. Each paper is 180 single-best-answer multiple-choice questions, split across two sessions of 2 hours 33 minutes on the same day.
Do the arithmetic: 90 questions per session, 153 minutes. That's roughly one minute forty-two seconds an item, including the ones where you need to re-read the fact pattern.uk rather than relying on anyone's remembered breakdown.
What makes tort dangerous is that the examinable content is broad and the doctrinal boundaries are fine. Negligence alone spans duty, breach, causation, remoteness, defences, psychiatric harm, economic loss, employers' liability and product liability. Add occupiers, vicarious liability, private nuisance and Rylands v Fletcher, and you have a subject where "I know the general principle" is nowhere near enough.
The negligence chain: five links, and you must name the weak one
Every negligence MCQ is secretly asking: which link in the chain breaks? If you can identify the link, you can usually eliminate three options before you've finished reading them.
Duty of care
Forget the idea that you apply a three-stage test to everything. Where the situation falls into an established category — road user to road user, doctor to patient, employer to employee, manufacturer to ultimate consumer — a duty simply exists and the question has moved on. The incremental, analogy-based approach matters only when the relationship is genuinely novel, or when you're dealing with omissions, public authorities and the police, or third-party wrongdoers.
The recurring FLK1 traps: there is generally no duty to rescue a stranger; a duty may arise where the defendant has assumed responsibility, created the danger, or has control over the third party. Watch for fact patterns where a defendant does nothing at all — that's an omissions question wearing a negligence costume.
Breach
The standard is that of the reasonable person doing that activity. Two refinements do most of the work in MCQs. Learners and the inexperienced are held to the standard of the competent practitioner — sympathy is not a defence. Professionals are judged by the Bolam standard, tempered by Bolitho: a body of professional opinion must itself be logically defensible. And children are judged against a reasonable child of the same age.
Then the risk factors: magnitude of risk, seriousness of potential harm, cost and practicability of precautions, and the social utility of the activity. If a question stem tells you a precaution would have cost £15 and taken ten minutes, the examiner has just handed you the answer.
Causation and remoteness
"But for" causation first. If the harm would have happened anyway, the claim fails at this gate — the classic authority being the arsenic-poisoning case where the doctor's failure to examine made no difference to the outcome. Where there are multiple potential causes, know the exceptions: material contribution to the harm, and the mesothelioma-type material increase in risk line of authority. These are heavily examined precisely because candidates blur them.
Intervening acts break the chain only if sufficiently unreasonable or unforeseeable. A claimant's own foolish conduct can do it; ordinary medical treatment following an injury usually doesn't.
Remoteness asks whether the type of damage was reasonably foreseeable — not its extent, and not the precise mechanism. Which brings you to the thin skull rule: take your victim as you find them. If the type of harm is foreseeable, an unusually severe outcome caused by the claimant's pre-existing condition is still recoverable.
Defences
Contributory negligence reduces damages; it never extinguishes them. Consent (volenti) is a complete defence but narrowly applied, and it cannot be run against a rescuer in most circumstances. Illegality is rarer still. When an MCQ offers you "the claim will fail because the claimant was partly at fault", it's almost always wrong — contributory negligence apportions, it doesn't defeat.
The single most common tort error I see in practice questions isn't a misremembered case. It's a candidate who identifies the right principle and then picks the option that gets the consequence wrong — total defence versus partial reduction, damages versus no liability at all.
Occupiers' liability: two Acts, one decision point
This topic is a gift, because it's rule-based and the rules are short. Learn them properly and you'll convert every occupiers' question you see.
The decision point is always the same: is the claimant a lawful visitor or a trespasser? Visitors go under the Occupiers' Liability Act 1957. Trespassers — and lawful visitors who exceed their permission, which is the trap — go under the Occupiers' Liability Act 1984.
The 1957 Act in five lines
- The occupier owes the common duty of care: to take such care as is reasonable to see that the visitor will be reasonably safe in using the premises for the purposes for which they are invited or permitted to be there.
- Occupier means the person with sufficient control over the premises — there can be more than one.
- Children: an occupier must be prepared for children to be less careful than adults. Allurements matter.
- Skilled visitors: an occupier may expect a tradesperson to guard against risks ordinarily incident to their trade. The window cleaner and the chimney sweep are the standard examples.
- Independent contractors: the occupier may discharge the duty if it was reasonable to entrust the work to a contractor, reasonable steps were taken to check competence, and — where reasonable — the work was checked once done.
Warnings can discharge the duty if, in all the circumstances, they were enough to enable the visitor to be reasonably safe. A sign saying "Danger" at the top of an unlit staircase with no handrail probably isn't. Exclusion is possible in principle, but liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence cannot be excluded in a business context under the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, and consumer contracts and notices are governed by the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
The 1984 Act
A duty is owed to a non-visitor only if all three statutory conditions are met: the occupier is aware of the danger or has reasonable grounds to believe it exists; knows or has reasonable grounds to believe the other is in the vicinity of the danger; and the risk is one against which, in all the circumstances, the occupier may reasonably be expected to offer some protection. The duty, if it arises, is to take such care as is reasonable to see the person doesn't suffer injury by reason of the danger. And note the point candidates forget under pressure: no recovery for property damage under the 1984 Act.
Also remember the "obvious dangers" line of authority — an occupier is generally not required to protect an adult against the obvious risk of diving into shallow water they have chosen to run.
Worked example
Facts. A leisure centre engages a cleaning firm to deep-clean its poolside every evening. On Monday, the cleaners leave a section of tiling wet with no cone. Ravi, a member, slips at 8pm and fractures his wrist; his watch is destroyed. Later that night, at 1am, a 16-year-old climbs a 2-metre fence — the centre knows local teenagers have done this three times in the past month — and cuts himself on a broken diving board the centre has known about for weeks.
Analysis. Ravi is a lawful visitor: 1957 Act. The centre may be able to point to the independent contractor provision, but only if entrusting the cleaning was reasonable, the firm was checked for competence, and reasonable inspection of the work followed. Nightly cleaning of a poolside is exactly the sort of routine task an occupier can be expected to spot-check; the absence of any inspection system is the pressure point. Ravi can recover for the wrist and, in principle, for the watch.
The teenager is a trespasser: 1984 Act. Awareness of the broken board — yes. Reasonable grounds to believe trespassers are in the vicinity — three incidents in a month, yes. A risk against which some protection is reasonably expected — a broken, sharp diving board is not an obvious risk voluntarily run, so probably yes. Duty likely owed. But no recovery for any property he damaged.
Notice how the analysis turned on facts the examiner deliberately planted: "three times in the past month", "no cone", "known about for weeks". SQE1 stems are not padded. If a detail is there, it's load-bearing.
Pure economic loss: the topic that separates the top quartile
Here's the plain-English version. The law is comfortable compensating physical injury and property damage. It is deeply uncomfortable compensating pure financial loss — money lost without any accompanying damage to the claimant's person or property — because the ripple effects are limitless.
So the general rule is no duty in respect of pure economic loss caused by a negligent act. The exceptions are what get tested.
The cable-cutting distinction
Facts. A contractor negligently severs the power cable to a metalworks. The molten metal in the furnace at that moment solidifies and is ruined, and the works loses the profit it would have made on that melt. Because the power is off for fourteen hours, four further melts that would have been processed never happen.
The ruined metal is property damage — recoverable. The profit on that melt is consequential economic loss flowing from the damaged property — recoverable. The lost profit on the four melts that never started is pure economic loss — not recoverable. Same defendant, same negligent act, three different outcomes. Learn this pattern; it recurs constantly in MCQ form with different facts bolted on.
Negligent misstatement
The main exception is liability for negligent statements where there is an assumption of responsibility and reasonable reliance — the Hedley Byrne line. In an exam stem, look for: a defendant with special skill or knowledge; awareness of the purpose for which the statement will be used; knowledge that the claimant, or a limited class, will rely on it; and actual reasonable reliance causing loss. A disclaimer, subject to the statutory controls on exclusion, can negate the assumption of responsibility.
The auditors' case gives you the classic negative: accounts prepared for existing shareholders to exercise governance rights do not create a duty to a takeover bidder who relies on them to buy shares. Purpose is everything.
Psychiatric harm, briefly
Related, and equally rule-driven. Primary victims — those in the actual zone of physical danger — recover for recognised psychiatric injury provided some physical injury was foreseeable. Secondary victims must satisfy the control mechanisms: a recognised psychiatric illness, close ties of love and affection, proximity in time and space to the incident or its immediate aftermath, and perception by their own unaided senses. Watching it on television, days later, will not do.
Don't skip the back half of the syllabus
Candidates over-invest in negligence and then meet a vicarious liability question cold. Give these their own revision slots:
- Employers' liability — the personal, non-delegable duty covering competent staff, safe plant and equipment, a safe place of work and a safe system of work, alongside the statutory route for defective equipment.
- Vicarious liability — two stages. Is the relationship one of employment or akin to employment? Is the tort sufficiently closely connected with what the tortfeasor was authorised to do? Independent contractors generally fall outside it.
- Product liability — the Consumer Protection Act 1987 strict liability route (defective product, damage, defendant within the statutory categories, plus the defences and the exclusion of damage to the product itself and low-value property claims) sitting alongside common law negligence.
- Private nuisance and Rylands v Fletcher — who can sue (an interest in the land), what's actionable, locality, and the non-natural user requirement.
- Trespass to the person — assault, battery, false imprisonment, and the distinction from negligence.
How to actually revise this for the MCQ format
Reading tort is not revising tort. The format rewards recognition speed, so build your sessions around retrieval.
- Write the chains from memory. One blank page, five minutes: negligence elements; the 1984 Act's three conditions; the secondary victim control mechanisms; the four employers' liability duties. If you can't reproduce them cold, you can't apply them at 100 seconds an item.
- Drill in mixed sets. Doing 30 occupiers' questions in a row teaches you to expect occupiers. Real FLK1 doesn't warn you. Mix tort with contract and dispute resolution so your first job is always identifying the subject.
- Interrogate wrong answers by category. Was it a knowledge gap, a misread stem, or a consequence error? Log which. After 200 questions you'll see your personal pattern, and it's rarely what you assumed.
- Time yourself from the start. Untimed accuracy is a comforting lie.
This is where a decent question bank earns its keep. I used the Ant Law SQE Question Bank for exactly this — 14,000+ single-best-answer questions tagged down to sub-topic, so you can isolate "occupiers' liability — trespassers" for twenty minutes and then throw yourself back into mixed practice. The smart practice engine pushes your previously wrong answers and weak topics back at you, which is far more useful than re-reading a chapter you already half-know. And when an explanation doesn't land, the AI legal tutor lets you ask the follow-up question you'd otherwise sit on for a week.
On the wider picture: passing SQE1 is one component of solicitor qualification in England and Wales. You also need a qualifying degree or equivalent, two years of qualifying work experience (QWE), success at SQE2, and satisfaction of the SRA's character and suitability requirements. Published SQE pass rates move between sittings and are best read as trends rather than targets — the SRA's own statistical reports are the place to look, not forum chatter.uk; that is the only source worth trusting on the current position.
Start tonight with something small and specific: take a blank page, write out the three conditions under the Occupiers' Liability Act 1984, then do 20 mixed tort questions under timed conditions and log every error by category.ai.