The Interference of the Interferance Principle

Chief Constable of Northamptonshire Police v Woodcock [2022] EWHC 1661 (QB)

“[T]he serious study of reasoning in regard to disputed matters of fact is at least as important and can be at least as intellectually demanding as the study of reasoning in respect to disputed questions of law.” - Lady Justice Rose, citing William Twining on the work of Ronald Dworkin

I am writing this post for two reasons. First, because it is essential that I understand new judgments by the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal (i) to help my students learn about the liability of public authorities in negligence, (ii) the fact-contingency of the cases in this area of law have always worried me. While context is everything in law, and particularly in administrative and tort law, this is quite different from aruging that facts mean everything. This is clearly at stake in Chief Constable of Northamptonshire Police v Woodcock. This post argues that the law cannot develop in a principled way when so much turns on the construction of specific facts, particularly with respect to states of mind, the nature of which is uncertain.

1. Chief Constable of Northamptonshire Police v Woodcock [2025] EWCA Civ 13

If readers cast their minds back a few weeks, I considered the liability of public authorities in negligence with respect to Michael v Chief Constable of South Wales Police. In that post, I interrogated the helpfulness of the acts and omissions distinction in the context of a ‘failure to confer benefits.’ Woodcock is a fact patern which puts even more pressure on this distinction between acts and omissions, or failures to confer benefits, because it is a ‘failure to warn’ case rather than a ‘failure to protect’ case.

This is a set of two, dreadful failure to work cases. In the first, which I’ll focus on here, Woodcock is a victim of repeated domestic violence. She is concerned that her ex-partner Riza Guzelyurt will harm her and her children. She alerts the police. The police do take this warning seriously, waiting outside her house until 3AM until a shift change. The claimant is advised to, inter alia, (i) lock all her doors and windows, (ii) keep her phoned charged, and (iii) stay inside and - crucially - (iv) to ask neighbours to keep a lookout. The police try to arrest the ex-partner but are unable to locate him, but make plans to do so when he goes to work at 8AM. What happens next matters a great deal:

‘[31] At 7.32 AM a female neighbor rang 999 and said that Guzelyurt was loitering outside Ms Woodcock’s house and “I think he’s going to attach her whe she comes out to go to work…She’s going to go to work about 7.45.” The neighbour described Guzelyurt as “lurking on the corner” and “pacing up and down with his arms behind his back” and added: “I’ve tried contacting her but she’s changed her mobile number so there’s no way of me, unless I go over I don’t really want to get involved.”

At the conclusion of the call, the call hander said to the neighbor:

“Okay, I’m going to get the officers to go straight round, we need to obviously stop anything taking place and I’ll have a look and see what we know about them as well, okay.”

In response to this call, the police are dispatched to Woodcock’s house, but they do not pass on this warning from the neighbour about the possibility of an imminent attack.

When Woodcock leaves the house to go work, Guzelyurt stabs her several times causing serious injuries. She claims damages in negligence from the police. Ritchie J finds a claim in negligence. He argues that there would be no point in asking neighbors to keep a lookout if the police were not going to pass such calls along, and that Ms Woodcock was relying on the health and saftety plans given to her by the police.

2. Tindall v Chief Constable of the Thames Valley [2024] UKSC 33

In Woodcock, Court of Appeal is applying new Supreme Court authorities, including the recent decision in Tindall v Chief Constable of the Thames Valley [2024] UKSC 33. In Woodcock, the Court of Appeal held that the “interference principle”, recognised by the UKSC in Tindall at [50] and [56] was not engaged. This interference principle says that if A knows or ought to have known that B is in need of help to avoid some harm, and A knows or ought to have known that he has done something to put off or prevent someone from helping B, then A will owe a duty to take reasonable steps to give B the help she needs. The Court concludes (in both of the combined cases) that there is not any evidence, or findings by the trial judge, that the police had prevented or put off someone else from helping, or that they knew or ought to have known that they had done so.

The facts of Tindall matter in understanding the motivation for the interference principle. Early in the morning on 4 March 2024, the first driver (K) lost control of his car on an area of black ice while driving. K was not seriously injured. K, who had worked as a road-gritter for ten years, though, could see black ice to be the cause of the collision and that this risk presented an imminent danger to all drivers. K phoned emergency services and, while waiting, (bravely, I think) warned drivers of approaching vehicles to slow down.

When police officers attended the scene, they put out a ‘slow’ sign. Once the debris from the accident was cleared from the road, however, the police left the scene, taking their sign with them. Since K had also left the scene, other motorists were given no warning about the black ice. An hour after the initial collision by K, another driver ‘B’ looses control of his vehicle only 184 meters from the original crash. His vehicle crosses in the path of an oncoming car, by ‘T’, and both B and T tragically die.

The (then) Independent Police Complaints Commission concluded that the officers had a case to answer for gross negligence manslaughter and misconduct in public office. The case was referred to the Crown Prosecution Service, who declined to prosecute the officers who attended the crash. A police disciplinary tribunal found the officers involved to be guilty of misconduct and gross misconduct.

So, how does this case fare as a high-court negligence claim? One would think it is looking pretty strong. It was argued that ‘but for’ the arrival of the police at the scene of K’s accident, K would have continued making attempts to warn other motorists of the ice on the road. The claimant contended that the police made matters worse by displacing K’s efforts without taking any comparable steps of their own to warn motorists of the hazard after they left. Their alternative submission was that a duty of care arose from the fact that the police took control of the scene, and then relinquished control without removing the underlying hazard.

The claimants loose in the UKSC, and no finding of negligence is found.

One of the key takeaways from the claim is that the evidence with respect to state of mind really matters with respect to the intervener principle. If a claim is brought, it must be clear why the public authority knew, or should have reasonably known that their positive act would put off a third party from intervening to take protective measures.

3. The Fact-Indeterminacy of the Interference Principle

The difficulty is, as seen in Woodcock, is that this matter of constructive knowledge is almost impossible to establish. It is impossible to say what the neighbour would have done in Woodcock had she not thought the police would pass along her call. It is impossible to say whether the police made matters worse by displacing K’s efforts to warn other drivers. This matter of constructive knowledge, further, does not really bear on what actually matters: the question of whether there is an assumption of responsibility.

What troubles me about these cases is twofold. First, seeing these cases through the lens of the acts and omissions distinction forces the focus on questions of facts and constructive knowledge which are unanswerable. Second, the interference principle itself shifts the focus away from the question of whether there is an assumption of responsibility. It has almost become a way to avoid accountability by public bodies, rather than a mechanism to acheive it.

4. What Facts Can, and Can’t, Establish

There are circumstances, as I’ve quoted Lady Justice Rose at the top of this post in saying, when disputing matters of fact reveal a great deal about a case. Cases about the liability of public authority in negligence have been treated this way. How did the police respond on the phone, did they say to ‘stay put’ or ‘we are on our way?’ Are the public services you call in an emergency, such as the ambulance or fire brigade, different than services more akin to contract such as speech pathology? These are just, I think, the wrong questions. What really matters is whether public authorities assumed responsibility. In cases like Woodcock, Ritche J was surely right to say that the answer is ‘yes.’ The neighbor in that case thought the police would handle the situation. That is what the police are for. This demonstrates that the acts and ommissions distinction is, through the adoption of the interference principle, shifting the focus in these ‘failure to warn’ cases to the constructive knowledge of bystanders, rather than where it ought to be: the negligence of the public body.