Various Claimants v News Group Newspapers Limited

Permission to amend a statement of case at a late stage depends on the balance between the need for a fair and up-to-date case and the prejudice, delay, cost and disruption caused to the opposing party and the trial timetable.

Amendments should generally be permitted where they particularise existing allegations or arise from genuinely recent disclosure, provided they are proportionate. The court may refuse amendments that introduce collateral or claimant-specific issues, add new lines of inquiry, require extensive further disclosure, or threaten the fixed trial date. A generic pleading should address issues common to the claims; it should not become an unlimited compilation of every allegation against the defendant.

The remaining claimants in the fourth tranche of the Mobile Telephone Voicemail Interception Litigation applied for permission to re-re-amend the Generic Particulars of Concealment and Destruction. The proposed amendments added extensive allegations concerning unlawful information gathering, concealment, destruction of evidence, senior employees, private investigators, public statements and limitation.

The application was opposed on grounds including prolixity, irrelevance, delay, prejudice, disproportionality, limitation and the risk to the January 2025 trial. The central issue was which amendments were necessary and proportionate for the fair trial of generic issues shared by the remaining claims.

1. Application granted in part and refused in part. The court refused permission for the amendments as a whole where they would imperil the fixed trial date or impose substantial and disproportionate investigative and disclosure burdens.
2. The application was late and close to being a very late amendment. Except for amendments based on call-data disclosure in November and December 2023, the delay was not satisfactorily explained. The balance of prejudice therefore generally favoured NGN.
3. Amendments adding detail to existing generic allegations, further examples, or names of journalists and editors involved in already pleaded forms of wrongdoing were generally permissible where proportionate and supported by existing disclosure. Some amendments based on recent disclosure were also permitted.
4. The GENPOC was a factual generic pleading. It disclosed no cause of action and did not itself create new causes of action. Causes of action and remedies remained pleaded in the claimant-specific particulars of claim. Extending the generic period would amount to a new claim only where an individual claimant sought relief for wrongdoing in the additional period.
5. Concealment and destruction of evidence could be probative of the scale, nature and extent of wrongdoing where other evidence of wrongdoing existed. An inference of the Armory v Delamirie kind could arise on a generic issue, including the extent of wrongdoing or an executive’s knowledge, although the proper inference remained a matter for trial.
6. The court refused amendments concerning collateral matters, including alleged obstruction of police investigations, the Management and Standards Committee, Rupert Murdoch’s personal knowledge, and other issues that were claimant-specific, disproportionate, or likely to create satellite litigation. The trial date was not to be vacated.