Procedural non-compliance no longer fatal to court claims
23/03/2026
Everyone has a constitutional right to access to justice - and in the context of civil claims for damages, that includes the right to issue a claim in person, without retaining the services of a lawyer. Obviously, this is a good thing.
Or is it?
At the risk of appearing cynical, journalists and publishers (and their lawyers!) will be all too familiar with litigants-in-person who are, obviously, absolute experts in libel, privacy, data protection and so on; who do not need representation by a specialist lawyer; and who regard any attempt at pointing out the legal hurdles they have to overcome as mere attempts to tie them up in legal knots.
A common mistake is to issue a claim out of time.
The Limitation Act 1980 sets out the time periods in which a claim must be issued before it becomes “time-barred”. They vary significantly depending on the relevant legal basis for the claim. For example, the limitation period for a claim in defamation is one year from the date of publication of the article complained of, whereas a claim for misuse of private information must be brought within six years of the alleged incident.
In practical terms, for a claim to be considered as having been issued, a claimant must file with the court a fully completed Claim Form, together with Particulars of Claim (if not marked to follow) and the correct court fee calculated by reference to the relevant guidance. Crucially, all of this must be done before the relevant limitation period has expired.
If a claim is issued outside of the relevant limitation period, then the defendant has a complete defence to the proceedings.
So, with all this in mind, it’s worth considering a recently heard case in the Court of Appeal that has seen an important practical issue decided upon for the first time at this level. It concerns the question of whether a failure to pay the correct court fee for the issue of a claim form meant that the claim itself had not been validly started for the purposes of limitation.
Whilst the subject of much inconsistent judicial treatment over the years in the High Court, it has now been held that proceedings are considered to have been “brought” when a claim form is lodged at a court, provided that a fee of some amount is paid, even if it is not the correct amount, provided that the claim form itself was submitted in time and was otherwise correct.
In the case of Siniakovic v Hassan-Soudey, the Claimant brought claims in defamation and malicious falsehood against the three defendants. Whilst the claim form had been sent to the High Court prior to the expiry of the limitation period, the correct fee was not paid to the court. Consequently, the claim form was rejected, and the Claimant was required to re-submit the claim form together with the correct fee. However, by the time this had taken place, the limitation period had expired.
As is standard practice, the Claimant made an application for ‘relief from sanctions’ – effectively a pass on the consequences provided that they rectify the error that had taken place. The application was granted in the High Court, but this decision was appealed by the Defendant.
In the Court of Appeal, the Claimant argued that this was a “non-abusive” failure to comply with the rules, alongside a claim that had otherwise been brought in time, it would not be just for the court to find the failure to pay the correct fee to be fatal to the claim.
The Court of Appeal agreed with that analysis. In her decision, Lady Justice Andrews explained:
“It is one thing to miss a deadline for filing; that is generally inexcusable. That is quite different from making a mistake in the payment of the fee, which can easily occur… There is also plenty of scope for a litigant in person to make an error of this nature… litigants in person are expected to comply with the rules of practice and procedure in the same way as everyone else, but that does not mean that they necessarily understand them, and they quite often get things wrong.”
She went on to state:
“I should make it clear that that does not give claimants or their representatives carte blanche to make deliberate underpayments, or to buy themselves additional time by deliberately delaying payment of the shortfall once the court office has drawn it to their attention. In a case, unlike the present, where it transpires that the claim has been deliberately undervalued in order to avoid payment of the correct fee, there are plenty of other sanctions available to the court, including, in a particularly egregious case, striking out the claim”
Whilst on the face of it this appears a technical point only of interest to legal practitioners, it is the reference to litigants -in – person that means that publishers ought to sit up and take notice of this decision.
More and more disgruntled individuals are bringing often ill-conceived claims against publishers which have to be dealt with via the formal courts process costing valuable time and money. Failures in procedural compliance such as expiry of limitation periods and payment of incorrect court fees have in the past proved useful tools for a swift and economical disposal of an otherwise nonsense claim.
Whilst the Court of Appeal says that deliberate failures to comply will not be tolerated, this formal confirmation that unintentional non-compliance will no longer be fatal to a claim begs the question of where the line will be drawn and how it will be policed.
For the purists, who consider that all barriers to access to justice should be removed, this is undoubtedly a good decision.
However, those who actually have to deal with litigants-in-person will consider this to be an unwelcome judgment which will both encourage the pursuit of unmeritorious claims and push up the irrecoverable costs that publishers nearly always have to bear, even when they are successful.
Is this cynical of me? Perhaps. But I like to regard my concerns as being realistic, based on the practicalities of having to deal with some of our fellow citizens with unjustified grievances against the news providers.