The Supreme Court has dismissed Peter Murphy’s appeal against the non-suit of his damages action over criminal conviction data held by State bodies and his motor insurer. The court accepted two grounds of appeal on legal issues, but held that the evidence still did not establish the claims and the non-suit was correct.
Murphy’s plenary proceedings arose after ARB Underwriting Ltd cancelled his motor insurance policy in 2006. The judgment says he did not contest the cancellation and accepted the returned premiums. He later sought correction or erasure of records concerning convictions he said were inaccurate or too old to retain.
The High Court dismissed the action in 2012, after Murphy and his son gave evidence and before the defendants called evidence. The Supreme Court reviewed that non-suit on appeal. It distinguished the damages action from earlier judicial review proceedings, which had concerned a request for orders to correct or erase data.
Justice Baker held that the High Court was wrong to treat the damages claim as an abuse of process merely because a statutory data-protection process existed. Section 7 of the Data Protection Act 1988 preserved a tort remedy for breach of a data controller’s duty of care. The court also held that the earlier judicial review did not make the damages claim res judicata. Murphy therefore succeeded on appeal grounds 7 and 6, respectively.
Those conclusions did not change the outcome. The 1988 Act did not create strict liability or a new cause of action: a claimant still had to prove a breach of duty and a causal link to loss. The Supreme Court agreed that Murphy had not established negligence or unfairness in the processing of his data, or any loss. It also upheld the finding that his injurious falsehood claim failed because he had not produced evidence that the allegedly incorrect information was published.
The appeal therefore failed overall, and the High Court’s order granting the defendants a non-suit stood. The Supreme Court did not decide the later complaints about data requests made in 2017 and 2018, or whether any convictions should be treated as spent under the 2016 Act; it said those matters fell outside the proceedings under appeal.