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Prior to the enactment of section 13A of the Insurance Act 2015, the insured's benefits were not well protected in indemnity insurance if the insurer delayed in payment of insurance money. This is because, in the light of the 'hold harmless' principle under English common law, the insurer's obligation in insurance is to prevent the peril insured against from occurring, leading to the situation that the insured's claim for any sums due sounds in damages rather than in debts. In view of the rule confirmed by the authority that the law does not recognise a concept of damages for late payment of damages, the insured would not be entitled to any compensation for losses caused by the insurer's late payment. From the authorities held by the court, even though the insured suffered a large number of losses due to the insurer's late payment, such as 'Sprung v Royal Insurance (UK) Ltd' as well as 'Apostolos Konstantine Ventouris v Trevor Rex Mountain', the insured did not obtain any other payment than the sums due in the policy plus interest. The old approach to addressing insurer's late payment under English law was less protective of the insured's benefits and adverse to the long-term development of the English insurance market. In order to remove the defects in English common law, section 13A was inserted, by the Enterprise Act 2016, into the Insurance Act 2015, demonstrating that there is an implied term in every contract of insurance that the insurer must pay the sums due as regards the insured's claims within a reasonable time. Section 13A refers to the application of this implied term, including factors to judge a reasonable time, reasonable grounds for disputing the insured's claim and remedies for breach of this implied term. However, a few questions related to section 13A appeared after it came into force. There should be more detailed guidelines for section 13A if the court wishes to apply it well in practice. Among other things, section 13A(5) only provides damages as an approach to remedy the insured but does not provide a detailed interpretation and the method to apply it. Hence, to reveal the entire contents of section 13A(5) and provide beneficial guidelines, this thesis will primarily conduct in-depth research concerning this subsection. Different elements of this subsection will be analysed to achieve the desired outcome of this thesis, namely, to conclude if the law reform has been as effective as was required and, if not, how it can be improved.

Much research has gone into determining stress fields of dislocation, as the understanding of dislocations is fundamental to understanding metal or crystal plasticity. In this thesis, the stress field of a rectangular dislocation loop in an infinite isotropic solid is developed for a Volterra-type dislocation with three non-zero Burgers vector components. Also, the stress and strain fields of a rectangular dislocation loop in an isotropic solid, which is a semi-infinite medium, are obtained here for a Volterra-type dislocation. Moreover, analytical and numerical verifications of the developed stress/strain fields are performed. This is done by ensuring the satisfaction of the equilibrium equations and the strain compatibility equations. The results of this paper add to the knowledge base of elastic fields of dislocation loops and has its own application.