I. The Hill Immunity Principle

Hill v. Chief Constable of West Yorkshire is known to tort students as the famous “Yorkshire Ripper” case. It involved an action against the police brought by the mother of the last victim of a notorious serial killer (the “Yorkshire Ripper”). The mother alleged that the police had been negligent in failing to identify and capture the killer before he had a chance to murder her daughter. In the preceding five year period, the Ripper had already killed 12 young women in the Yorkshire area. The claim failed firstly on the basis that there was insufficient proximity between the police and the daughter. The police had not had any personal dealings with her and she had not been singled out at any time as being more at risk from the killer than any other young female in the area. Secondly the claim was said to be defeated by the public policy arguments of defensive practice and diversion of police resources.

The defensive practice argument encapsulates the idea that the threat of liability will cause individuals who provide valuable services to the community to begin acting in an excessively cautious manner. The idea is that these individuals will take extra time and use additional resources in an attempt to eliminate even the most unlikely risks, adopting what may be colloquially described as an unnecessarily wasteful “belt and braces” approach to the performance of their tasks, and that this will impact detrimentally on the provision of the valuable service. Thus the entire community will suffer as a result. Such arguments tend to be wholly conjectural.Footnote ⁶ Certainly, the House of Lords in Hill did not refer to any actual evidence in support of the applicability of the defensive practice argument to the police function. Quite evidently, it may just as easily be argued that the threat of liability will produce exactly the opposite effect, in that it will motivate individuals to do their jobs better and therefore result in improved levels of service for the community. Giving the lead speech of the House in Hill, Lord Keith acknowledged this possibility but rejected it on the basis that “[t]he general sense of public duty which motivates police forces is unlikely to be appreciably reinforced by the imposition of such liability so far as concerns their function in the investigation and suppression of crime. From time to time they make mistakes in the exercise of that function, but it is not to be doubted that they apply their best endeavours to the performance of it.”Footnote ⁷ As indicated already, history has since revealed that Lord Keith's faith in the general benevolence of the police was, at best, overly optimistic.

The diversion of resources argument is perhaps more tenable in that it is at least objectively verifiable. For it is obvious that it costs both time and money to defend any legal action. And where police defendants are concerned, this will involve the depletion of already limited public funds. However, this argument is generally applicable to all public body defendants and in practice it appears to have carried little general weight. It is certainly not common practice for it to feature as a central defence argument. As the recent decisions in both Van Colle and Smith demonstrate, the Hill public policy immunity principle has come to be associated almost exclusively with the defensive practice argument.

II. The House of Lords Decision in Chief Constable of Hertfordshire Police. Van Colle

The facts of Van Colle are as follows: two days before he was due to appear in court as a prosecution witness at a theft trial, Giles Van Colle (“the deceased”) was shot and killed by the man against whom he had been summonsed to give evidence (“the accused”). In the months leading up to the murder, the deceased had been the victim of a campaign of intimidation at the hands of the accused. Although each individual incident had been reported to the police, DC Ridley, the officer in charge of the case, had failed to identify that the deceased was at risk of serious harm from the accused and thus had taken no steps to try to protect him.

Following the accused's conviction for murder, the deceased's parents made a formal complaint to the Police Complaints Authority about DC Ridley's handling of the case. Their complaint was upheld and DC Ridley was subsequently found guilty by a disciplinary panel of failing to perform his duties conscientiously and diligently in connection with intimidation by the accused of both the deceased and another prosecution witness. On the basis of his vicarious liability for the acts and omissions of his officers, the deceased's parents then brought an action under s. 7 of the Human Rights Act against the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire, alleging a breach by DC Ridley of his s. 6(1) duty to act compatibly with the deceased's rights under Articles 2 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Following a full trial in the High Court, Cox J. allowed the claim. She held that, on the authority of Osman v. UK,Footnote ⁸ the state's positive obligation under Article 2 to protect life included a positive obligation in certain circumstances to take preventative, operational measures to protect an identified individual whose life was at risk as a result of the criminal acts of a third party. As set down by the European Court of Human Rights in Osman, the obligation arose where it was established that the state authorities knew or ought to have known at the time of the existence of a real and immediate risk to the life of that individual. She found that, on the evidence, DC Ridley knew or ought to have known that the deceased was at special and distinctive risk of harm from the accused. In arriving at this conclusion on duty, she relied heavily on dicta from the Court of Appeal decision in R. (A) v. Lord Saville of Newdigate,Footnote ⁹ to the effect that where the state contributes to the risk of harm to life by requiring an individual to appear as a witness, the Osman test of knowledge of a real and immediate risk to life is lowered and thus easier to satisfy. In holding that DC Ridley had committed a breach of that duty by failing to take appropriate measures reasonably available to him to obviate the risk to life, she relied on the findings of the disciplinary panel. Causation was duly established by evidence that the protective measures available would have had a real prospect of altering the outcome and avoiding the death. Cox J. awarded damages in the total sum of £50,000, made up of £15,000 to the deceased's estate in respect of the distress he suffered in the weeks leading up to his death and £35,000 to his parents in respect of their own grief and suffering.

On appeal, the Chief Constable challenged the judge's decisions on both liability and quantum. He argued that, on the facts as pleaded, a duty had neither been owed nor breached and that the wrong test for causation had been applied. In accordance with the ordinary common law approach to causation, he argued that it was necessary to show that “but for” the infringement of Article 2 the deceased would have survived. On the question of quantum, the Chief Constable submitted that the judge's award was too high. The Court of Appeal allowed the appeal in part. While it upheld the findings of the judge on liability, it found that the amount of damages awarded was excessive in the circumstances and it accordingly reduced the award from £50,000 to £25,000 (made up of £10,000 to the deceased's estate and £7,500 each to the claimants, the deceased's parents).

On appeal to the House of Lords, the Chief Constable focussed on the finding of a duty. Relying primarily on dicta of Lord Carswell in In re Officer L,Footnote ¹⁰ he argued that the threshold of the Osman test of knowledge of a real and immediate risk to life was very high and was not variable in accordance with the type of situation in question. As such, he contended that both the High Court and the Court of Appeal had erred in finding that the deceased's role as a witness had endowed him with a special status which justified the lowering of the standard Osman test. Accepting this contention, the House of Lords unanimously allowed the appeal in Van Colle. Designating the Newdigate decision as one confined to its own facts, Lords Bingham, Hope, Phillips, Carswell and Brown all agreed that the Osman test was a constant, to be applied whatever the particular circumstances of the case. The high threshold had not been met in this case, where the warning signs were even less clear and obvious than those in Osman, which had themselves been found inadequate to meet the test. DC Ridley could not have been expected to have anticipated that a minor case of theft, followed by a catalogue of fairly trivial incidents of possible intimidation, would result in a brutal murder.

III. The House of Lords Decision in Smith (FC) v. Chief Constable of Sussex Police

The claimant in Smith was threatened with extreme violence over a period of months by his ex-partner, after having ended their relationship. He had repeatedly told the police about the threats, the majority of which had been sent as text messages, and had given the police both the name and address of the ex-partner, as well as the mobile number from which the relevant text messages had been sent. Despite having ample evidence and information to arrest the ex-partner, the police failed to do so. The ex-partner subsequently attacked the claimant with a claw hammer leaving him with serious and permanent injuries, and was later convicted of making threats to kill and causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

Out of time for suing for a breach of his Convention rights under the HRA (for which the limitation period is a mere 12 monthsFootnote ¹¹), the claimant brought an action in negligence against the police for failing to protect him in the circumstances. On the application of the police, the claim was struck out at first instance as having no real prospect of success on two grounds. Simpkiss J. held that there was no sufficient relationship of proximity between the claimant and the police and that in any event, following the decision in Hill, public policy militated against the imposition of a duty of care in this situation. On appeal, the Court of Appeal reversed the decision of Simpkiss J., holding that the claim was not doomed to failure and that it should be allowed to proceed to trial. Sedley, Rimer and Pill L.JJ. were all of the opinion that the facts of Smith were potentially distinguishable from both Hill and the House of Lords decision in Brooks v. Commissioner of Police (no duty of care to victim of racist attack who was initially treated as a suspect in his friend's murder in the same incident).Footnote ¹² In the words of Sedley L.J., the facts of Smith were far starker than the assumed facts of Brooks while, in contrast to the claimant in Hill, Smith's claim did not depend on his status as a member of the public facing a risk common to many others.Footnote ¹³ Placing great emphasis on Osman v. UK, Sedley L.J. went on to say that the degree of proximity between the parties could be used to overcome the public policy considerations which would otherwise bar the claim and to create a duty of care. In his view, a very clear example of a similar approach was provided by the decision in Swinney v. Chief Constable of Northumbria,Footnote ¹⁴ in which the Court of Appeal was prepared to recognise that a duty could be owed by the police to protect an informant whose identity they had negligently disclosed. The public interest in the protection of informants was to be regarded as outweighing the public interest in protecting the police from liability as regards their performance of their duties. In this respect, he could see no valid ground of distinction between witnesses and informers.Footnote ¹⁵ The decision in Swinney thus provided a powerful justification for dismissing the strike-out application and allowing the claim to be determined at full trial.

Reversing the decision of the Court of Appeal, a 4 to 1 majority of the House of Lords (Lord Bingham dissenting) held that the claim in Smith was defeated by the defensive practice argument enshrined in Hill.Footnote ¹⁶ Cautioning against any retreat from Hill, their Lordships adopted a blunt utilitarian rationale and argued that the interests of the wider community had to be prioritised over those of the individual.Footnote ¹⁷ Rejecting any argument that Hill had to be qualified in light of subsequent developments in the law, most notably the decision in Osman, they placed great reliance on the decision in Brooks and treated the “core principle” of Hill as having remained intact. Addressing the relevance of Swinney, Lord Hope presented it as falling outside the “core principle” as it was (in his view) not concerned with the police function of investigating and suppressing crime in the public interest,Footnote ¹⁸ while Lord Brown presented it as an exceptional decision based on evidence of an assumption of responsibility.

Significantly, however, Lord Phillips admitted that he had arrived at his decision with some reluctance, being of the opinion that the facts of Smith came close to constituting the kind of “outrageous negligence” that Lord Steyn had contemplated in Brooks as being outside the remit of the Hill principle.Footnote ¹⁹ He further commented that the difficult issues of policy raised by Smith were a matter for Parliament to resolve rather than the courts,Footnote ²⁰ thereby arguably implicitly acknowledging that the current legal position was in need of redress. Similarly, Lord Carswell was “unable to escape some feeling of concern” in applying the “core principle” to the facts of Smith, acknowledging that Smith “tested the principle severely”,Footnote ²¹ while Lord Brown admitted that his decision was “not without hesitation”.Footnote ²² He acknowledged that the facts of Smith were “really very strong”Footnote ²³ and “vastly different from those either in Hill or in Brooks” and that it would be “easier to contemplate liability here than in either of those cases.”Footnote ²⁴

The doubts expressed by their Lordships were undoubtedly influenced by the powerful dissenting speech delivered by Lord Bingham. He alone would have recognised the existence of a duty based on what he termed “the liability principle”, according to which: “if a member of the public (A) furnishes a police officer (B) with apparently credible evidence that a third party whose identity and whereabouts are known presents a specific and imminent threat to his life or physical safety, B owes A a duty to take reasonable steps to assess such threat and, if appropriate, take reasonable steps to prevent it being executed.”Footnote ²⁵ On the facts of Smith, this principle was easily satisfied by the fact that the claimant had furnished the police with strong evidence of threats from an identified third party, and that as between the claimant and the police there was a strong relationship of close proximity created by numerous face-to-face meetings with evidence of an assumption of responsibility. Having correctly identified the remit of the so-called “core principle”, Lord Bingham did not regard his liability principle as being inconsistent with either Hill or Brooks. Crucially, he was dismissive of the defensive practice argument as applied by the majority, rightly pointing out that all that the liability principle would call for in the first instance would be a reasonable assessment of a very specific threat.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, the principle would only ever come into play in very limited scenarios.

IV. The Hill Principle and the Common Law Action in Negligence

The decision of the House of Lords in Smith highlights two main problems with the current judicial approach to the application of the Hill principle: (1) a lack of understanding as to its nature and ambit; and (2) the tenuousness of the defensive practice argument as the sole justification for the imposition of a de facto immunity. I have already discussed both problems at length elsewhere and do not propose to recite the same arguments in detail here.Footnote ²⁷ Suffice to say that the current major obstacle to the proper interpretation of Hill lies in the House of Lords decision in Brooks. This is keenly demonstrated by Smith, in which even Lord Bingham, who was otherwise very sympathetic to the argument that there should be a retreat from the immunity principle, wholly misrepresented the relevance of the Brooks decision.

As mentioned briefly above, Brooks involved a negligence action against the police for alleged mistreatment of a witness to a murder resulting in psychiatric harm. The incident had been investigated by an independent body as part of a wider public inquiry into the murder and the findings of the inquiry were damning in the extreme.Footnote ²⁸ Crucially for Mr Brooks, the police were found to have treated him in an improper and racially discriminatory manner. Despite such strong evidence of negligently unreasonable behaviour, the House of Lords dismissed the action for lack of duty, relying directly on the Hill ratio. However, the presiding Law Lords (Lords Bingham, Nicholls, Steyn, Rodger and Brown) failed to take into account the fact that the ratio of Hill stemmed from a third party liability action against the police and that its statements on proximity and public policy were specific to that context.

Third party liability, whereby one party is held responsible for failing to control the conduct of a third party harm-doer, may be regarded as a form of omissions liability. While the English courts are hostile to omissions liability generally, they are even more hostile to this particular subset of such liability, for it involves imposing liability on the wrong party. In third party liability cases, there is always going to be someone more obviously to blame than the defendant, and that is the actual harm-doer. Long before Hill, the courts had put into place special restrictive rules on the existence of affirmative third party duties to control. In Home Office v. Dorset Yacht,Footnote ²⁹ the House of Lords set out that in addition to two relationships of close proximity (one as between the defendant and the victim, and another as between the defendant and the harm-doer), the conduct of the harm-doer resulting in damage to the victim must have been highly foreseeable in the circumstances. Where these special requirements are not satisfied, as they were not in Hill, then various legal and policy reasons militate against the imposition of a duty, of which a defensive practice argument is but one. For instance, where the potential class of victims covers the public at large, then a genuine floodgates concern most obviously comes in to play.

As a case involving a straightforward misfeasance, Brooks should not have been dealt with under the Hill principle. There were strong reasons for imposing a duty based on the standard Caparo principles of foreseeability, proximity and fair, just and reasonableness, with the decision in Swinney providing a particularly compelling analogy. Nevertheless, the House of Lords in Brooks decided that the Hill principle covered all negligence actions against the police in respect of their duties in investigating and suppressing crime. As will be discussed below, this labelling of a police duty as being concerned with the investigation and suppression of crime is much too broad and imprecise.

Until Brooks is challenged, there is little chance of the Hill principle being properly understood and implemented. It is very discouraging in this respect that even Lord Bingham in his speech in Smith got Brooks completely wrong. In arguing that his “liability principle” did not challenge the authority of Brooks, he presented Brooks as being a third party liability case similar to Hill and justified the dismissal of the action on the basis that it involved neither an identified suspect nor evidence of any threat at all to the life or physical safety of the claimant.Footnote ³⁰ Somewhat bizarrely, Lord Bingham described the pleaded case as being that, whilst the attackers remained at large, Duwayne Brooks was frightened for his own safety, not least because he lived in the same locality.Footnote ³¹ While it may indeed have been true that Mr. Brooks feared reprisals from the attackers, this did not form the basis of his claim in negligence against the police. It was predicated purely on the active conduct of the police in treating him as a suspect to the crime rather than as a victim and a witness.

V. Lessons from Australia

While it cannot be said that the Australian courts have actually rejected the Hill principle,Footnote ³² they have at least shown themselves to be much more measured in their application of it,Footnote ³³ and their rules on public authority liability generally are much more defensible as a result.Footnote ³⁴ As mentioned earlier, useful reference may be made to, the recent judgment of Campbell J.A. in State of NSW v. Tyszyk. In this case, two police officers were sued for failing to protect a member of the public from the risk of personal injury posed by a dangling downpipe. The officers were present at the scene having responded to a telephone call from a passerby reporting the danger. Shortly after they arrived however, and before they implemented any precautions in relation to the downpipe, a tree fell across a nearby road and blocked the thoroughfare. While the officers were attempting to move the tree, the claimant pulled up in his vehicle and parked underneath the loose pipe. Upon alighting from his car, the pipe fell and struck him on the shoulder. In response to the defence argument that the police were under no duty of care in accordance with Hill on the basis that they were engaged in an investigation at the relevant time, Campbell J.A. stated that Hill was not an authority that there was immunity from liability in negligence for police officers in all circumstances.Footnote ³⁵ He explained further: “It seems to me that the principle that Hill stands for is that, when there is a criminal at large who has demonstrated a propensity to commit crimes against a particular group of people, and that group of people is a large one, police owe no duty to of care to persons who might become a victim of that criminal, concerning the strategies adopted and resources to be employed in seeking to identify and arrest that criminal.”Footnote ³⁶

He thus found that the defendants in Tyszyk could not benefit from Hill immunity. Nevertheless, he avoided their liability on alternative grounds which were not only simpler but entirely more convincing. Essentially, he held that as the officers had not contributed to the risk of harm, so that all they could be accused of in the circumstances was a pure omission, then in accordance with the ordinary rules governing omissions liability, it was necessary to show that they had entered into some kind of special relationship with the victim before an affirmative duty could be said to arise. In this case, there was nothing in the relationship between the officers and the victim which placed the victim in a different situation to that of any other member of the public who was also at the scene at the time.Footnote ³⁷ The decision in Tyszyk demonstrates very clearly that it is possible to limit the Hill principle and still protect the police from liability in certain contexts. Without wishing to state the obvious, it is perhaps similarly necessary to point out that the imposition of a duty will not always result in actual liability either, for breach and causation will still have to be proven.

Campbell J.A.'s judgment in Tyszyk is also important in demonstrating the significance of the act/omission distinction in the context of police negligence liability. Indeed the operation of the distinction explains why a duty of care has in the past been imposed on a police defendant. Notably, both Knightly v. Johns Footnote ³⁸ and Rigby v. Chief Constable of Northamptonshire Footnote ³⁹ involved positive acts on the part of the police. In the former, a police officer instructed the victim to ride his motorcycle round a blind bend in a tunnel against the flow of traffic, while in the latter the police had fired a canister of CS gas into a shop without ensuring that adequate precautions were in place to put out any fire that might result. That is not to say that a positive act on the part of the police causing harm will always result in a duty, for it may well be the case that the relevant requirement of foreseeability is not satisfied. It merely means that the existence of a duty is arguable in the ordinary way. Where, on the other hand, the police are sued for failing to prevent harm, then an exceptional affirmative duty will not arise unless there is evidence of a special kind of pre-tort relationship existing between the police and the victim. The easiest way to establish the necessary kind of pre-tort relationship is to provide evidence of an assumption of responsibility on the part of the police towards the victim. This would require personal dealings between the parties and evidence that the police had encouraged the victim to rely on their protection to their detriment. Hence the existence of the duty in Swinney, where the police led the claimant informant to believe that they would keep her identity protected. Other pre-tort relationships will automatically give rise to a duty to protect from foreseeable harm, such as the relationship between custodian and detainee. Cases such as Kirkham v. Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police,Footnote ⁴⁰Reeves v. Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis Footnote ⁴¹ and Orange v. Chief Constable of Yorkshire Police Footnote ⁴² establish that the duty will even extend to protecting against the risk of self-harm, at least where the detainees' self-harming tendencies have been brought to the attention of the custodial authority. Here the nature of the affirmative duty being imposed is entirely compatible with the performance of the custodial function, and there are no obvious policy arguments against liability.

Hill should no longer be treated as applying to all police conduct associated with the investigation and suppression of crime. This is what has made it such an unwieldy tool for controlling police liability, for such a category can also be made to extend to mundane administrative tasks. For example, in the Australian case of Tame v. New South Wales,Footnote ⁴³ a police officer who was sued for allegedly causing psychiatric harm to the plaintiff after wrongly recording a blood alcohol reading as being positive resorted to arguing that he should avoid liability on the ground that his conduct fell under the rubric of a police investigation. A less convincing scenario for a defensive practice immunity argument would be hard to imagine, all the more so because the resort to the immunity argument was so unnecessary in the circumstances. The claim was a very weak one and arguably it was always destined to fail. Although the High Court was able to dismiss it on other grounds, it could arguably have been dispensed with on the simple basis that the harm in question was not reasonably foreseeable in the circumstances.

At present, immunity is the starting point for the judicial assessment of police negligence liability, while the existence of a duty is the exception. It is argued here that this situation ought to be reversed. There are too many different versions of the police function and too many different contexts in which an allegation of negligence may be raised for there to be blanket rule. There will be policy considerations relevant to some police functions which may justify a finding of no duty in certain circumstances, but the relevance of these considerations will necessarily be very fact-sensitive. As such they will need to be assessed on a case by case basis, and in accordance with the Osman ruling on proportionality in relation to the conferral of policy-based immunities, the policy arguments against the recognition of a duty will need to be weighed against the arguments in favour. As an entirely untested argument,Footnote ⁴⁴ the defensive practice argument should never be used on its own to justify police immunity in an individual case.

VI. Police Immunity and the Action under the HRA for Breach of an Article 2 Positive Duty

In Van Colle, the House of Lords made it clear that the police would rarely be liable under the HRA for failing to protect an individual from the criminal acts of a third party. Determined not to allow all their efforts with the Hill principle to be undone through the creation of a backdoor route to compensation, their Lordships deliberately interpreted the existing HRA and European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence as restrictively as possible, so as to create a test for police liability under the HRA which would operate in a similar fashion to its common law cousin. Thus it is likely that only those claims which would fall within Lord Steyn's exceptional category of “outrageous negligence”, as set out in Brooks, will pass the so-called Osman test of “knowledge of a real and immediate risk of harm to life”. It will be a case of double or nothing, and usually nothing. Once again, however, it is argued that the House of Lords needs to adopt a more refined and context-specific approach to the determination of this form of police liability.

It is probably useful to explain briefly the legal basis for the type of HRA action taken against the police in Van Colle. The HRA, which came into force in October 2000, was conceived as mechanism for giving “further effect” to the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (hereafter ECHR), and to enable some direct enforcement of certain ECHR rights within the domestic courts. It is important to recognise that the Act does not make ECHR rights generally enforceable in domestic law; it merely makes them directly enforceable against public authorities. Section 6(1) of the HRA imposes a duty on public authorities to act compatibly with ECHR rights. Under section 7, an individual whose protected rights are contravened by a public authority, such as the police, is entitled to initiate proceedings directly against the authority. Section 8 empowers the court to provide a remedy in the form of damages. As a public authority, the police thus fall under the section 6 duty to act compatibly with individual ECHR rights. The ECHR right in issue in Van Colle was Article 2, which protects the right to life. Where the police contravene the Article 2 interests of an individual, they may be said to have breached their section 6 HRA duty, as a result of which they can be sued under section 7 HRA.

In protecting the right to life, Article 2 has been interpreted as imposing a range of different duties on the state and its organs. First and foremost, it imposes a negative duty to refrain from taking life. Secondly, however it also imposes a number of what may be termed “positive duties”, which require the taking of active measures to protect life, and these may be sub-divided into (1) procedural duties; and (2) substantive duties. The primary procedural duty imposes on the state an obligation to carry out an independent public investigation into any death occurring in circumstances in which it appears that an individual's Convention rights have been, or may have been, violated and it appears that agents of the state may be in some way implicated, whether through deliberate act or negligent omission. Usually the investigation will take the form of an inquest.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Article 2 procedural duty will for example by triggered by the non-natural death of a prisoner in custody.Footnote ⁴⁶ The category of Article 2 positive substantive duties must be further subdivided into: (a) a primary duty on the state to establish an effective system of criminal law to deter those who threaten life, backed up by law enforcement machinery to prevent and punish its breaches; (b) secondary duties on individual public bodies such as hospitals and prisons which are charged with the care of vulnerable persons to operate appropriate institutional systems and procedures for protecting life; and (c) specific operational duties on individual public bodies to take preventative measures to protect an individual whose life is at risk from the criminal acts of another. It is this latter operational duty which was the subject of the claim in Van Colle.

The operational duty was first set out by the European Court of Human Rights in Osman v. UK, which described it as being triggered by evidence that the relevant authorities knew or ought to have known at the time of a real and immediate risk to the life of an individual from the criminal acts of a third party. Once triggered, the duty gives rise to an obligation to take reasonable measures, within the scope of the powers of the relevant authority, which might be expected to avoid that risk, but subject to the following qualification: “… bearing in mind the difficulties involved in policing modern societies, the unpredictability of human conduct and the operational choice which must be made in terms of priorities and resources, such an obligation must be interpreted in a way which does not impose an impossible or disproportionate burden on the authorities.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus the duty is not designed to be a particularly onerous one and there is certainly scope for a significant degree of flexibility as regards the manner of its application. And similarly to the third party negligence liability principle established by the Dorset Yacht case, it has a very limited remit in that it will only be in exceptional scenarios that the authorities will have actual or constructive knowledge of a specific threat to an identifiable victim from an identified third party harm-doer.

The English courts should have little to fear from the implementation into domestic law of the Osman operational duty. Case law subsequent to Van Colle may perhaps indicate that the wariness of the courts stems from a failure to appreciate its sphere of applicability. To be precise, they may be worried that the imposition of such liability on the police will necessarily lead to a plethora of Article-2-based HRA claims against various other public authorities, culminating in the creation of a general public authority duty to actively protect any individual who comes to their attention as being at risk of serious harm, either from themselves or at the hands of a third party. For in recent months, two such claims have reached the House of Lords: Savage v. South Essex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust Footnote ⁴⁸ and Mitchell v. Glasgow City Council.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, it is likely that the majority of such speculative claims could be easily dismissed on the basis that the operational Article 2 duty is only applicable to certain public authority functions, most notably those involving the care and control of vulnerable individuals. Thus the only bodies likely to be caught by such liability under the HRA are the police, the prison service and the NHS, particularly as regards its mental health services.Footnote ⁵⁰ This is because their functions are amongst the few that are compatible with the requirements of the operational duty. Thus the action in Savage was rightly allowed to proceed to trial, for it was concerned with the failure of a psychiatric hospital to take reasonable steps to prevent a compulsorily detained patient from committing suicide. Moreover, there was direct Strasbourg jurisprudence on this very kind of duty in the form of the well-known case of Keenan v. UK.Footnote ⁵¹ In deciding Savage, the House of Lords correctly identified that both the relationship of protection and control between the parties and the clear vulnerability of the victim were key to the application of the operational duty. Nevertheless, when the case of Mitchell came along, a slightly differently composed House failed to distinguish it on these obvious grounds. Mitchell involved a HRA action against a housing authority for failing to protect one of its tenants from serious harm at the hands of another tenant. The House of Lords should have simply dismissed the claim outright by declaring that the Osman operational duty was inapplicable to the facts on the basis that it was entirely incompatible with the public purpose and function of a housing authority, and with the nature of the relationship which exists between a landlord and tenant. However, Lord Rodger was the only member of the panel to even touch on either of these issues. The others simply went through the motions of applying the Osman test before ultimately avoiding liability on the basis of an entirely unconvincing conclusion that the requirement of knowledge of a real and immediate risk had not been satisfied. On the facts, there was very strong evidence of direct knowledge of the risk posed to the victim by the other tenant.Footnote ⁵²

In short, there was no need for the House of Lords in Van Colle to fix the threshold for the Osman test of knowledge of real and immediate risk at such a high level. Although the operational duty is readily applicable to the police function, it will only ever be triggered by knowledge of a specific serious threat to a named individual, and it will only ever require the taking of reasonable steps to assess the threat and provide appropriate protection. And if the remit of the Article 2 operational duty is properly clarified by the House of Lords, then there would be no reason to fear an influx of HRA claims against other public authorities for failing to protect life.

VII. Should the Common Law Develop in Harmony with the Human Rights Act?

A broader issue thrown squarely into focus by the Van Colle and Smith decisions is the nature of the relationship between the common law action in negligence and the new statutory action for breach of ECHR rights under the HRA.Footnote ⁵³ For if the conclusion is reached that the two ought to develop in harmony, then the decision in Smith is rendered all the more dubious. However, it is an issue on which opinion is currently divided, as demonstrated all too clearly by the contrasting approaches adopted in this respect by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords in Smith. For while Sedley, Rimer and Pill L.JJ. were resolutely pro-harmonisation, as was Lord Bingham, Lords Hope, Phillips, Carswell and Brown were resolutely separatist.

Nevertheless, the fact that the English courts, as public authorities for the purposes of the HRA, are themselves subject to the section 6 duty not to act incompatibly with ECHR rights, which translates into a duty to develop the law in a manner that is consistent with such rights, may be cited as a very strong argument in favour of harmonisation. Moreover further support may be drawn from the decisions of both the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords in D v. East Berkshire Community Health NHS Trust,Footnote ⁵⁴ in which, specifically in anticipation of the imminent coming into force of the HRA, the seminal House of Lords decision in X v. Bedfordshire County Council Footnote ⁵⁵ was partially overruled so as to ensure better protection of the ECHR rights of child claimants suing in negligence in respect of child protection decisions. Given the difficult history of public authority negligence liability, and in particular, the strength of disagreement invoked by the European Court of Human Rights decisions in both Osman and Z v. UK Footnote ⁵⁶ it is unlikely that a consensus on the question of the relationship between the common law action in negligence and the new HRA action will be reached any time soon. It is however an important matter which warrants immediate attention and it is hoped that the decisions in Van Colle and Smith will at least compel the necessary full and open debate.