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Contract and Commercial Law Act 2017

Other commercial matters - Carriage of goods - Liability under contracts of successive carriage

271: When successive carriers are jointly responsible or separately responsible for goods

You could also call this:

"Rules for who's in charge of your stuff when different delivery people handle it"

Illustration for Contract and Commercial Law Act 2017

If you're sending goods using multiple carriers, here's how responsibility works:

All the carriers are jointly responsible for your goods from the time the first carrier takes them until the time the main carrier's responsibility would normally end. This means they share responsibility during this period.

Each carrier is also separately responsible for your goods during the time they have them. This starts when they receive the goods and ends when they pass them to the next carrier. For the last carrier, their separate responsibility ends when the main carrier's responsibility would normally end if it wasn't a multi-carrier journey.

These rules are based on sections 270 and 258(1) of the law. They help make sure your goods are looked after throughout their journey, even when they're being handed from one carrier to another.

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View the original legislation for this page at https://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1986/0120/latest/link.aspx?id=DLM6844589.

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Part 5Other commercial matters
Carriage of goods: Liability under contracts of successive carriage

271When successive carriers are jointly responsible or separately responsible for goods

  1. For the purposes of section 270, successive carriers are jointly responsible for the goods from the time when the goods are accepted by the first successive carrier for carriage in accordance with the contract until the time when, if the contract were not a contract of successive carriage, the contracting carrier’s responsibility would have ended under section 258(1).

  2. Each successive carrier is separately responsible for the goods from the time when the goods are tendered to the successive carrier in accordance with the contract until the time—

  3. when they are tendered by the successive carrier to the next successive carrier in accordance with the contract of carriage; or
    1. in the case of the last successive carrier, when, if the contract were not a contract of successive carriage and the successive carrier were the contracting carrier, the carrier’s responsibility would have ended under section 258(1).

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