Court of Appeal on EQC Land Class Action

On 11 & 12 June 2025 the Court of Appeal heard appeals by Natural Hazards Commission (formerly EQC) and the homeowners about the land class action certified in the High Court on 14 December 2023. 

The High Court granted leave to appeal on 27 May 2024. EQC asked for the certification to be set aside saying that the McEvedy/Freer claim is/was meritless, statute/time barred and that they were not good representatives. 

McEvedy & Freer wanted the class increased to include homeowners whose land had Increased Flooding Vulnerability (IFV) as well as assignees of claims and homeowners that had sold the land but kept the claim. McEvedy & Freer also wanted to be able to challenge the correctness of the 2014 declaratory judgment that land is insured for indemnity value only. 

The Judges were Courtney J, Ellis J and Campbell J.  No predictions of when the judgment will be given.

EQC should pay the full cost to reinstate your land

Prior to the Canterbury earthquakes, EQC had never settled land claims based on 'diminution of value' (DOV), it always settled on the actual cost of reinstatement.  Even for the Canterbury earthquakes, EQC paid the cost of the reinstatement for all other land damage types other than increased liquefaction vulnerability (ILV) and increased flooding vulnerability (IFV).

EQC's lawyers at the time, Chapman Tripp, recommended DOV as a measure of loss, as a way to minimise payments to homeowners.  The quote below is from EQC's own geotechnical engineers, Tonkin + Taylor.

"DoV was a construct of the lawyers acting for EQC who did not believe EQC customers should receive windfall gains when land was damaged by liquefaction, but not lost, and could still be utilised by EQC customers. In particular DoV pertained to new categories of land damage, namely Increased Liquefaction vulnerability (ILV) and Increased Flood Vulnerability (IFV)."

Once this EQC Land class action is certified by the Court there will be qualifying criteria that homeowners will need to meet.  In the meantime, we recommend that you register now and we can keep you up to date as the claim progresses.

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What is this EQC Land class action about?

The representative plaintiff (representing all of the homeowners) is arguing that EQC should have paid the cost to reinstate the land to the value of the cap (as set out in s19 of the Earthquake Commission Act 1993).  It says EQC was wrong to pay a substantially lesser amount calculated by EQC using its DOV methodology.

EQC says that it has fulfilled its statutory obligation by paying for the land damage based on its DOV methodology.  It says this claim is a direct challenge to the High Court declaratory judgment in Earthquake Commission v Insurance Council of New Zealand Inc in 2014.  We believe that the declaratory judgment contains a number of errors which need to be corrected, and if need be, challenged through to the appropriate Court.

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What does it cost?

It costs you nothing to register and registering does not obligate you to anything.

If in the future you receive a settlement as a result of the class action, the litigation funder will charge a fee.  This fee will be determined by the Court based on an application made to it.

You will never be asked to pay any money up front or pay for a share of any costs – it’s simply a deduction off any amount you are entitled to receive once the class action is resolved.  

Frequenty asked questions

Further information about the claim

If you have questions about this class action, please contact us and one of our team will be in touch with you.