What happened: A court found an insurance broker liable for £1.25 million after it switched a client's business interruption cover to a cheaper policy it did not understand.
Who's involved: Camstar Herbs Limited, Advisory Insurance Brokers (trading as Morgan Law Insurance Brokers), Aviva (insurer on the policy).
What's at stake: £1,249,362.50 in damages, plus interest to be determined.
Why it matters: The case turns on a broker's failure to understand the difference between gross profit and gross revenue BI cover — a distinction that left over a million pounds in post-fire payments entirely uninsured.
Where it stands: Judgment handed down on October 27, 2026. Interest and costs to be agreed or determined at a consequentials hearing.
Camstar Herbs Limited is the largest producer of dried parsley in the world outside China. It runs two processing plants in Suffolk, and about 60% of all harvested parsley flows through the main facility, known as Camstar 1. On August 16, 2021, a fire broke out at that plant.
Nobody was hurt. But Camstar's capacity to process parsley was severely reduced — and it still had a network of growers with crops in the ground, a specialist harvester with bespoke machinery, and a season already underway. The company's chief executive told staff immediately: the growers would be paid as normal.
The payments came to £1,249,362.50. When Camstar looked to its business interruption insurance, it discovered those costs were not covered. The London Circuit Commercial Court has now ruled that the shortfall was the broker's fault.
Before 2018, Camstar's BI cover was written on a gross revenue basis - a type of policy that covers the cost of purchasing materials for production. At renewal, the broker recommended switching to a cheaper quote from Aviva. The premium saving was roughly £7,000 a year.
The problem was that the Aviva policy was written on a different basis: insured profit, also called gross profit. Under that type of cover, purchase costs are stripped out of the calculation entirely. The practical effect, as the court heard, was that Camstar had "uninsured" the cost of buying the very parsley it processed - meaning those costs would not be covered if something went wrong.
The court found the broker's own recommendation letter made no mention of the change in cover. "Any reasonable reading of the recommendation would lead to the plain and obvious conclusion that Aviva was offering the same cover," the judgment states. Camstar took the cheaper option. No advice about the change was given.
The fire struck after the 2021 harvesting season had already begun. Many growers had completed a first cut and some a second. The crop was ready or growing. The growers had done their work.
Camstar's response was to compensate growers and its harvester based on what they would have earned had there been no fire. A base rate of 1,000 kilograms per acre at grade A pricing was used as a starting point, with adjustments for individual circumstances. The approach was not contractual - Camstar accepted it had a "commercial commitment" rather than a legal obligation.
The growers' evidence made clear the stakes. Several told the court that if they had not been paid for parsley they had grown but could not deliver, they would have sought legal advice and would not have grown for Camstar again. Defence counsel accepted in closing that a decision not to pay would have been not only "dishonourable" but "commercial lunacy."
The broker's defence rested on the argument that the payments to growers were covered under the existing policy as an "increased cost of working" - a category that reimburses extra expenses incurred solely to prevent or limit a drop in turnover.
The court rejected that argument. The payments were not an "increased" cost. They were an estimate, reached in good faith, of what growers and the harvester would have earned anyway. The purpose was to put them in the position they would have been in without the fire - not to provide financial support.
One of the most striking moments in the trial came from the loss specialist who handled the claim on behalf of the insurer - described by the court as an acknowledged expert in business interruption insurance. Asked how he would have responded if the loss assessor had tried to claim those payments as increased costs of working, his answer was: "I'd have told him to take a running jump."
He went further. "If you've uninsured your purchases, the fact that you subsequently realise you've got to carry on making them - you should have had a gross revenue policy."
The same witness acknowledged that an example in his own co-authored textbook on BI insurance - one the defence relied on - was wrong. "I wrote it and I know what I meant to write… the words are wrong," he told the court.
The court found the breach straightforward. A reasonably competent broker would have understood what type of policy Camstar needed, and would have understood the difference between gross profit and gross revenue cover. The broker did neither.
The defence argued that Camstar's own business continuity plan had not flagged the need for ongoing payments to growers. The court was unimpressed. The plan, Camstar's own operations director conceded, had been found to be "completely useless." That did not let the broker off the hook - the broker had its own independent duty to understand the client's business.
The full £1,249,362.50 was awarded as damages. The court accepted the sum was the product of good-faith negotiations between parties experienced in the parsley trade, and that no mathematical model could produce a single "correct" figure.
The case is a pointed reminder that the difference between gross profit and gross revenue BI cover is not a technical footnote - it is a placement decision that can leave a client's most critical post-loss payments entirely uninsured.
