Following on from my post earlier today on Niebel, readers may like to note that Jon Baines’s excellent blog, Information Rights and Wrongs has an interesting and detailed analysis of the Mansfield v John Lewis case – see here. The article suggests that Mr Mansfield’s damages may have garnered him the princely sum of £10!

As readers of this blog will know, the application of the Government’s criminal records scheme has been subject to extensive litigation of late (see further not least my post on an appeal involving a teacher and my post on an appeal involving a taxi-driver). Perhaps most importantly, in the case of T & Anor v Secretary of State for the Home Department, questions have been raised about whether the scheme as a whole is compatible with Convention rights and, in particular, the Article 8 right to privacy. Last year, the Court of Appeal concluded that the scheme was incompatible (see further Christopher Knight’s analysis of the Court’s judgment here). In a judgment given yesterday, the majority of the Supreme Court has agreed with that conclusion (Lord Wilson dissenting). The judgment will no doubt be subject to further analysis on Panopticon over the next few days. However, in short, the Supreme Court held that:

(a)    warnings and cautions given to the appellants by the police engaged their Article 8 right to privacy

(b)    the disclosure of those warnings and cautions in enhanced criminal records certificates (ECRCs) issued under the scheme amounted to an interference with the appellants’ right to privacy,  particularly as it affected their ability to enter a particular chosen field of endeavour, for example their ability to secure particular jobs and

(c)    the interference could not be justified under Article 8(2), particularly because the indiscriminate manner in which such information was provided under the scheme was not ‘in accordance with law’ for the purposes of Article 8(2), was not ‘necessary in a democratic society’ and was not otherwise proportionate.

On the latter point, the majority of the Supreme Court was clearly concerned about the fact that, in the context of ECRCs, warnings and cautions could be included in the relevant certificate irrespective of the nature of the offence, how the case had been disposed of, the time which had elapsed since the offence took place, the relevance of the data to the employment sought and the absence of any mechanism for independent review of a decision to disclose data. The majority of the Supreme Court evidently regarded the case of T as perfectly illustrative of the dangers inherent in such an indiscriminate scheme. In T, an ECRC was issued in respect of T containing information concerning police warnings which T had received when he was 11, in connection with the theft of bicycles. In the majority’s view, it was entirely unnecessary for such information to be disclosed when T applied, aged 17, for a job which involved working with children and also when he applied, aged 19, to attend university. The majority also refused the appeal against the Court of Appeal’s declaration of incompatibility in respect of the relevant primary legislation, namely the Police Act 1997.

What we see with this judgment, as with many judgments concerning the application of Convention rights, is a reluctant to favour blanket, administratively convenient solutions over more nuanced individual-centred schemes.

11KBW’s Jason Coppel QC acted for the Secretary of State. Tim Pitt-Payne QC appeared on behalf of Liberty.

Anya Proops

The spamming industry is a decidedly irritating but sadly almost unavoidable feature of our networked world. There is no question but that spamming (i.e. the sending of unsolicited direct marketing electronic communications) constitutes an unlawful invasion of our privacy (see further regs 22-23 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (SI 2003/2426) (PECR), implemented under EU Directive 2002/21/EC). The question is what can be done to stop it, particularly given that individual citizens will typically not want to waste their time litigating over the odd spam email or text?

Well one way to address this problem would be to have an effective penalties regime in place, one that effectively kicked the spammers where it hurts by subjecting them to substantial financial penalties. No surprise then that, in 2009, the EU Directive which prohibits spamming was amended so as to require Member States to ensure that they had in place penalties regimes which were ‘effective proportionate and dissuasive’ (see Article 15a of the Directive). This provision in turn led to amendments to PECR which resulted in the monetary penalty regime provided for under s. 55A of the Data Protection Act 1998 being effectively incorporated into PECR. Readers of this blog will be aware of recent litigation over the application of s. 55A in the context of cases involving breaches of the DPA (see further the current leading case on this issue Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust v Information Commissioner [2014] 1 Info LR 51, which you can read about here). But is the DPA monetary penalty regime really fit for purpose when it comes to dealing with spamming activities which are prohibited by PECR? If the recent decision by the Upper Tribunal in the case of Information Commissioner v Niebel is anything to go by, the answer to that question must be a resounding no.

The background to the Niebel case is as follows. Mr Niebel had sent out unsolicited text messages on an industrial scale. The texts sought out potential claimants in respect of misselling of PPI loans. The Information Commissioner, who had received hundreds of complaints about the texts, went on to issue Mr Niebel with a monetary penalty of £300,000. So far so unsurprising you might say. However, Mr Niebel has since managed to persuade the First-Tier Tribunal (FTT) to quash the penalty in its entirety (see its decision here) and now the Upper Tribunal (UT) has decided that the penalty should be left firmly quashed (see the UT’s decision here).

So how has Mr Niebel been able to avoid any penalty despite the patently unlawful nature of his activities? To answer that question one first has to understand the ostensibly high threshold which must be cleared if the power to impose a penalty is to be engaged. In short, the legislation only permits a penalty to be issued if there is ‘a serious contravention’ of the legislation (s. 55A(1)(a) and that contravention was ‘of a kind likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress’ (s. 55A(1)(b) – there is also a knowledge requirement (s. 55A(1)(c)) however that requirement will typically be made out in the case of unlawful spammers). But can it really be said that the sending of relatively anodyne spam text message is ‘of a kind likely to cause recipients substantial damage or substantial distress’? Both the FTT and the UT have now firmly answered this question in the negative.

In the course of its decision, the UT considered the following arguments advanced by the Commissioner.

–        First, when deciding whether the contravention was ‘of a kind’ likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress, it was possible to take into account not only the scale of the particular texts in issue but also the scale of Mr Niebel’s overall spamming operation. This was an important argument in the context of the appeal because, whilst there was no doubt that over time Mr Niebel had sent out hundreds of thousands of unsolicited communications, the Commissioner had identified ‘the contravention’ as relating only to 286 text messages in respect of which he had received complaints. (He had accepted that some 125 other complaints could not be taken into account as they related to communications sent prior to the coming into force of the penalties regime). The issue was therefore whether the wider context could be taken into account when deciding whether the contravention was ‘of a kind’ likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress.

–        Second, the word ‘substantial’ in this context must be construed as meaning merely that the damage or distress was more than trivial. This is because the penalties regime was plainly intended to bite on unlawful spammers who caused low level damage or mere irritation, and such individuals would not be caught by the legislation if the word ‘substantial’ was construed as carrying any greater weight.

–        Third, the FTT had otherwise erred when it concluded that the 286 texts in issue were not of a kind likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress.

On the first argument, the UT accepted that the scale of the contravention could be taken into account when deciding whether it was of a kind likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress. However, it rejected the argument that Mr Niebel’s wider spamming activities were relevant to the analysis. The UT concluded that activities these did not form part of the ‘contravention’ relied upon by the Commissioner and were not therefore relevant to the analysis when it came to deciding whether s. 55A was engaged (para. 38).

On the second argument, the UT accepted Mr Niebel’s argument that it was not appropriate to try and deconstruct the meaning of the word ‘substantial’ and that the FTT had not erred when it had concluded simply that the question whether the substantial element was made out was ‘ultimately a question of fact and degree’ (paras. 42-51).

On the third argument, the UT held that the FTT’s decision that the 286 texts in issue were not of a kind to cause substantial damage was ‘simply unassailable’. The FTT had been entitled to conclude that the mere fact that recipients might have felt obliged to send ‘STOP’ messages to Mr Niebel did not amount to ‘substantial damage’ (para. 54). On the question of substantial distress, the FTT had been right to conclude that not all injury to feelings would amount to ‘distress’ and that irritation or frustration was not the same as distress. It concluded that there was nothing in the recent judgments in Halliday v Creation Consumer Finance or Vidal-Hall v Google which required a different result. Moreover, the UT was not prepared to accept that the FTT had failed to take into account evidence before it arguably suggesting that individual complainants were in fact substantially distressed by the messages. In the UT’s view the FTT had plainly been mindful of this evidence when it reached its conclusions (paras. 67-73).

Perhaps the most telling line in the judgment is to be found in paragraph 65 where the UT, having noted that the Commissioner had probably done all he could to draw Mr Niebel into the cross-hairs of the legislation, went on to conclude that the most profitable course would be for ‘the statutory test to be revisited with a view to making it better fit the objectives of the 2002 Directive (as amended). So, for example, a statutory test that was formulated in terms of e.g. annoyance, inconvenience and/or irritation, rather than “substantial damage or substantial distress”, might well have resulted in a different outcome. What cannot be doubted is that, absent a successful appeal against the UT’s decision, this legislation will need to be revisited so as to avoid a situation where the spammers end up laughing all the way to the bank whilst the penalties regime descends into obsolescence.

However, I should add that the picture is not altogether rosy for the spammers of this world. According to recent media reports, John Lewis has recently had to pay out damages to Roddy Mansfield, Sky News producer, after it sent him an unsolicited marketing email (see the Sky News report of the matter here – the report does not confirm the quantum of the damages). This rather raises the question of whether, in the face of an apparently deficient monetary penalty regime, the best cure for the disease of unlawful spamming might be to mount a group action.

The Niebel case was another 11KBW affair with Robin Hopkins acting for Mr Niebel and James Cornwell acting for the ICO.

Anya Proops

The issue of just how open our justice system should be is an issue which is or should be of fundamental concern to all practising lawyers. If, as Jeremy Bentham once stated ‘publicity is the very soul of justice’ (cited by Lord Shaw in the leading case of Scott v Scott [1913] AC 477), then an open justice system is the corporeal expression of that soul. However, we now live in times where open justice is increasingly under threat. Indeed, as last week’s headlines reminded us all, matters have now got to a stage where some judges at least have been prepared to allow, not merely the deployment of a limited closed procedure to deal with certain aspects of a case, but a completely secret trial. It no doubt came as a relief to many that the Court of Appeal was not prepared to sanction such a comprehensive departure from the open justice principle: Guardian News v AB CD. However, the mere fact that the judiciary was prepared to contemplate such a procedure shows how far we have come since the days of Scott v Scott.

Today the open justice principle is back before the Court of Appeal as it hears the case of Browning v IC & DBIS (the Court comprises Maurice Kay LJ (Vice President of the Court of Appeal, Civil Division), Patten LJ and McCombe LJ). This time the core issue for the Court of Appeal to determine is the extent to which secrecy in judicial proceedings is a necessary evil in the context of appeals concerning the application of the FOIA regime (see Robin Hopkins’ post about the Upper Tribunal decision being appealed here).

Of course, the starting point in such a case must be that the information which is itself the subject of the appeal (i.e. the disputed information) should be withheld from the applicant and the wider public pending the outcome of the appellate process. Were it otherwise, an applicant would be able to access information which the legislation had designated as exempt simply by mounting an appeal. Plainly this cannot be the right result and it is not the result which Mr Browning is seeking in his case. Rather the issue which arises in Browning is the extent to which other sensitive evidence and submissions, which the public authority wishes to advance in support of its case on appeal, can equally be shrouded in secrecy.

This is a major issue both for applicants, the media and the wider public. This is so for two reasons.

–        First, if an applicant is unable to gain access to key evidence relied upon by the public authority in support of its case on appeal, then inevitably they will be substantially handicapped in advancing their case on appeal. In effect, they are conducting the litigation blindfolded and with one arm tied behind their back. Even if they are given the gist of the evidence in question, typically the devil is in the detail, with the result that the applicant is unable to fathom the substance of the case being put against them. Faced with that scenario, the applicant can only hope that the tribunal, possibly with the assistance of the Commissioner, will itself have the imagination, legal acuity and strength of resolve to subject the public authority’s closed evidence and submissions to proper testing during the closed session.

–        Second, the adoption of closed procedures substantially prevents any rigorous public scrutiny of the ways in which the judiciary is discharging its functions in the context of FOIA appeals. If open justice is, as Lord Shaw put it in Scott v Scott ‘the keenest spur to [judicial] exertion and the surest of all guards against improbity’ then the adoption of closed procedures is the surest way to strip the public of what has been described as its constitutional right to put the judges on trial and ensure that they are discharging their functions in a just manner.

That the latter concern is of real practical importance has been illustrated not least in a recent case in which I acted on behalf of an applicant: Brown v Attorney General, which you can read about here. In Brown, which concerned a request to access a so-called judicial practice direction concerning the sealing of Royal wills, the Upper Tribunal refused Mr Brown permission to appeal against the First-Tier Tribunal’s decision. It was clear that, in refusing permission, the Upper Tribunal had relied heavily on closed material to which Mr Brown had not been privy, although its open written reasons did not indicate how consideration of the closed material warranted this result. However, when the issue of the legality of the Upper Tribunal’s decision came before the High Court by way of a judicial review claim brought by Mr Brown, the Court, which had not been provided with the closed material, readily granted permission for Mr Brown’s claim to proceed. Thereafter the Attorney-General conceded the claim with the result that the appeal against the First-Tier Tribunal’s decision is now due to be substantively heard by the Upper Tribunal. The lesson one draws from this case is that it cannot be presumed that tribunals which reach decisions based on their analysis of closed materials consistently get the approach right.

Of course, it might be said that the appellate process is itself sufficient to address this problem, as it was in the case of Brown. However, there are three difficulties with this argument. First, it presumes, rather unrealistically, that applicants will themselves always have the courage and resources to take their cases to the higher courts. Second, it fails to address the significant point that very often, as a result of their exclusion from the closed process, applicants will have little clue whether or not an appeal would have legs, which very often will deter an applicant from even contemplating an appeal and will in any event substantially inhibit the formulation of potentially relevant grounds of appeal. Third, it ignores the constitutional right of the wider public to scrutinise the judicial process. Significantly, members of the general public, including members of the media, will themselves have no right to appeal in a case in which they were not a party.

So there we have the problem. What is the solution? Well Mr Browning’s case is simple: (a) the tribunal should ensure at a minimum that it rigorously tests assertions by the public authority that particular evidence or particular submissions need to be dealt with on a closed basis (this should now in any event be happening on a routine basis in the tribunal) and (b) in cases where some evidence or submissions have to be dealt with as part of the closed process, the tribunal should allow the applicant’s legal representative to see any closed material and take part in any closed hearing, on condition that he or she does not disclose any part of the closed material to the applicant or any third party. (Interestingly, and by way of contrast, in the Guardian v ABCD case, in the course of the first instance hearing of the application for the trial to be conducted in secret, the court permitted counsel for the media to see relevant closed materials and participate in the closed part of the hearing).

In view of the conclusions reached by the Upper Tribunal, one can anticipate that that the ICO and DBIS, who both resist the appeal will argue: (a) that a core difficulty with an approach which permits the applicant’s representative to access the closed materials/closed session is that it lacks the procedural safeguards available, for example where ‘special advocates’ are used – see further the Upper Tribunal’s decision where reference is made for example to the risk that the applicant’s representative will inadvertently leak closed material to the applicant and, further, (b) that the inquisitorial manner in which the tribunal approaches the exercise of its functions substantially diminishes the pressure to involve the applicant’s representative in the closed part of the hearing.

It remains to be seen what the Court of Appeal will make of these arguments. However, no one can doubt the importance of this case, not only in terms of establishing the applicable procedural rules for the information tribunal, but also in terms of the wider constitutional vitality of the open justice principle.

11KBW’s Ben Hooper is acting for the ICO.

Anya Proops