The law of vicarious liability has had to address the issue of responsibility for the negligence of an employee who is lent by his/her employer to another organisation. There are two key features of the common law's response. First, where enterprises are genuinely distinct the traditional view has been that the employer has sole responsibility and joint responsibility would not arise. Such an atomised view might be thought to be at odds with the interdependence between enterprises that frequently exists. Second, the permanent employer and not the temporary employer will normally be held to bear that sole responsibility.

The leading UK case on the latter point is Mersey Docks v Coggins. There a harbour authority (the permanent employer) let a mobile crane to a firm of stevedores for loading a ship, and provided a craneman. The general hiring conditions stipulated that the craneman was to be the employee of the hirers. In the course of the operation he injured a third person by negligently driving the crane. It emerged that the employer had engaged the craneman, paid his wages, prescribed the jobs he should undertake and alone had power to dismiss him. The firm of stevedores had the immediate direction and control of the operations to be executed by him with the crane, e.g. to pick up and move a piece of cargo from shed to ship, but had no power to direct how he should work the crane, the manipulation of the controls being a matter for him.