Leeds United Football Club Ltd v West Yorkshire Police

Where a police authority has unlawfully charged for special police services, the rebate should approximate the loss actually suffered. The court should prefer a methodology founded on established, independently verifiable facts, adjusted for changing costs and circumstances, and should minimise assumption and speculation.

Services provided on land owned, leased or controlled by the club remain chargeable. The relevant criterion is not whether the land is public or private, and the fact that leased land is indistinguishable from adjoining public areas does not alter that criterion. Legitimate charges may be assessed by attributing a fair and reasonable proportion of external policing costs to the relevant land.

The claimant had previously established that charges for special police services included an unlawful element because policing was provided beyond land owned, leased or controlled by the club. The earlier judgment was reported at [2012] EWHC 2113 (QB), and the Court of Appeal subsequently upheld the relevant criterion.

The parties could not agree the method for calculating the rebate for the 2009–2012 seasons. The claimant also sought determination of charges for the 2012–2013 and 2013–2014 seasons. The central issues were which methodology best approximated the legitimate charges, how to treat leased areas outside the stadium, and whether six-hour charging units and related principles remained permissible.

1. Methodology. The court rejected the defendant’s methodology because it depended materially on assumptions and speculation derived from selected sample matches and could not be independently checked with sufficient confidence. The preferable approach was the claimant’s methodology, using the established cost of stadium policing in 2008–2009 as a starting point, adjusted for changes in police remuneration, other costs, and the distribution of matches among risk categories.
2. Chargeable land. The governing criterion remained whether land was “owned, leased or controlled” by the claimant. There was no justification for replacing that criterion with a distinction between public and private land. The Lowfields Triangle and the other relevant blue and green hatched areas fell within the criterion and services provided there could properly be charged, so far as separately calculable.
3. Apportionment. Because officers and spectators moved across invisible boundaries, exact attribution was impossible. The legitimate external charges were therefore to be assessed by applying a fair and reasonable proportion of the overall external policing costs, while guarding against loading an excessive proportion onto the relevant areas.
4. Charging units and declarations. The earlier ruling at [58] had resolved that six-hour units, and time units exceeding the deployment length, could not be challenged absent an indefensible exercise of public law power. No such argument was advanced. The full-cost principle in Home Office Circulars 34/2000 and 09/2011 and the methodology in the ACPO Guidance, Paying the Bill 2, could accordingly be reflected in declarations.
5. The court declined to require a detailed match-by-match breakdown of officer deployment and remuneration. That would amount to unreasonable micro-management of the invoicing process. The precise loss was left for the parties to calculate in accordance with the resolved principles, with liberty to apply.

• High Court (Queen’s Bench Division): In the earlier judgment reported at [2012] EWHC 2113 (QB), the court held that only qualifying services provided on land owned, leased or controlled by the club could be charged as special police services.
• Court of Appeal: On 7 March 2013, the Court of Appeal upheld the relevant criterion. The present judgment applied that criterion in determining the rebate methodology and subsequent charges.
• High Court (Queen’s Bench Division): The court resolved the principal issues of methodology, apportionment, charging units and invoicing, leaving the final calculation to the parties with liberty to apply.