If you told him what you say here,

He should have

Removed all road wheels, stripped calipers of removed and cleaned pads/sliders. advised you of work to be done and specified if it was a safety issue.

Curuious lapse from a mechanic who has had your business for 10 years, but if he only did a visual inspection and could see brakepad thickness

How much did he charge?

I would ask some serious questions of him and possibly involve trading standards.

They are two different issues really. You took the car to the garage because the brake system was leaking pressure and you had no brakes. They found the fault for that and presumably fixed it to your satisfaction.

A sticking or dragging caliper will show up as a brake imbalance or wheel not freewheeling - it is quite possible that the caliper stuck because you fixed the brakes (i.e. it wasn't braking at all beforehand).

The mechanic obviously could have stripped every caliper and cleaned them but it would have landed you with a much bigger bill.

To a certain extent mechanics can't win in this situation. If they check everything to the nth degree and spend hours on it the customer complains because they have a huge bill and the mechanic has checked a load of stuff with nothing wrong with it - if they fix the obvious thing and try to keep the costs down for the customer the customer then complains if they've missed something.

Decent honest mechanics are few and far betweem, I'd hang on to him/her if I were you.

Hi, Thanks everyone for your comments and sharing your experience.

From what I can gather from the replies, the sticking brakes is something that would not have shown up unless specifically tested? And as he had already found a braking problem, he fixed that one. And yes, he could possibly have done more tests to see if there were any other braking problems, but that would have been a kind of 'let's take it all apart and check everything just in case there is another problem'. And that would have been a bit overkill and certainly expensive.

So if I've understood correctly, the answer to should my mechanic have spotted this? ... is basically, not necessarily.

Am feeling more reassured now, so thanks again for your replies, and for adding to my very limited knowledge on how braking works!

Generally if a proper service is done atleast annually (including stripping ,cleaning and copper greasing each set of brake pads and sliders) this kind of problem is usually avoided.

Usually it's cars that only get essential repairs plus a cheap £99 service and oil change that suffer from sticky brakes. Did the garage also look after the routine maintenance of the car - i'd be more concerned that whoever is doing the servicing is missing the brake cleaning and greasing aspect.

The garage should atleast have jacked each corner up and checked each brake for binding...but to be fair I would give them the benefit of the doubt as they did find a defective caliper and a slightly sticky brake sometimes only shows up on the mot rollers.....