Supreme Court judgment may open the door to successful liability claims against public bodies

Only around 50 cases per year (on average) make it all the way to the Supreme Court — the UK’s highest domestic court (formerly ‘The House of Lords’) — which has the final word when it comes to appeals within the UK legal system. So, what it says matters.

Often, the issues addressed by the Supreme Court can seem rather theoretical and of little obvious or practical importance to the ‘person in the street’.

However, its recent (23 October 2024) decision in Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police [2024] UKSC 33 could have very real everyday consequences.

Here, Head of Litigation Paul Lunt and Paralegal Ellis McManus explain a major development in the potential liability of public bodies and similar institutions.

Housing estate landlord scenario

Consider this scenario — you’re a tenant in a council-owned housing estate. It’s winter and there are various snow- and ice-covered pavements and car parks following days of deep-lying snowfall. 

Do you want your council landlord to either:

1. Do nothing about the danger posed by the thick snow and ice that has formed and settled in the car parks and on the pavements?
2. Take steps to spread salt and apply other measures to try to make it easier and safer to navigate the pathways and car parks?

You may well prefer that your landlord tries to help, rather than do nothing. Yet the traditional legal position is that even where someone slips and suffers serious injury, your council landlord can’t be held legally liable for declining to do anything to try to prevent injury to those who try to navigate the snow-covered pavements and car parks.

No legal duty to protect others from harm

Generally, a person has no legal duty to protect another person from harm. Legal liability generally only arises if a person acts in a way that makes another worse off as a result — meaning that the safest legal course of action may often be to decline to do anything to address a known danger (rather than risk attempting to improve matters but only, in fact, making them worse). 

As the law stood before the Tindall decision, the council landlord couldn’t even be held liable for any injuries suffered due to an ineffectual attempt by the council to make matters better (such as despatching salt-spreaders to the site but erroneously giving them the wrong location).

Key development in public body liability

However, in the case of Tindall, the Supreme Court revised this long-standing legal principle. Although there remains no general legal liability for failing to act to prevent harm, following the decision it’s now the case that an ineffectual response to a known danger is likely to establish a legal liability where the public authority knew (or ought to have known) that an inadequate response would make matters worse.

This is an important development in the potential liability of public bodies and similar institutions. On the very specific facts of the Tindall case, while a claim for compensation against a public body (the Police) failed, the decision may make it more likely that we’ll soon see successful claims being brought against public bodies for inadequate responses to known dangers. 

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