The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea & Anor v Beko Poland Manufacturing Sp zoo & Ors

In complex multi-party litigation, the court must balance the potential costs and settlement benefits of early alternative dispute resolution against the risk that inadequate information will make mediation ineffective or wasteful. Effective participation requires all parties to have sufficient information to engage constructively. Disclosure directions should promote transparency about issues, searches and electronic methodologies. A Disclosure Review Document may be preferable to an Electronic Disclosure Questionnaire where it better identifies disclosure issues and possible models. The court may tailor disclosure directions under Part 31 without wholesale adoption of a practice direction.

The ruling concerned case management in the Grenfell Tower litigation, involving claims by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and its tenant management organisation against numerous defendants and Part 20 defendants.

The court considered the relationship between mediation, disclosure and the trial timetable. It also addressed the structure of liability and quantum disclosure, the use of witness statements, Electronic Disclosure Questionnaires and Disclosure Review Documents, and whether the court should adopt Practice Direction 57AD wholesale.

1. ADR and disclosure. The court declined to anticipate a mediation before completion of liability and quantum disclosure. Although early mediation could produce significant savings, the court considered that the absence of clarity about the claimants’ decision-making and quantum material created a real risk that some defendants could not participate effectively and that mediation costs might be wasted.
2. The court directed completion of disclosure by the end of October 2026 and ordered the claimants to provide the proposed quantum appendices, explanatory note and relevant documents as part of the disclosure process. The material was not to be provided on a without-prejudice basis. Any earlier mediation remained possible, but was not the basis of the directions.
3. Trial timetable. The April 2028 trial date was vacated. Trial was instead listed to commence in October 2028, with an estimate of nine sitting months, allowing time for mediation and subsequent procedural steps.
4. Disclosure management. Transparency about past and prospective searches was considered more useful than requiring uniform Electronic Disclosure Questionnaires. Witness statements explaining what each party had done and proposed to do were directed for liability-related disclosure. A disclosure hearing was accommodated for April 2026, if required.
5. Quantum disclosure. The court preferred the Disclosure Review Document template because it required identification of disclosure issues, searches and electronic methodologies in one document. It preserved flexibility to propose disclosure models other than standard disclosure.
6. The court clarified that it was not adopting Practice Direction 57AD wholesale for quantum disclosure. It exercised its powers under Part 31 to prescribe the form in which disclosure issues and search methodologies should be identified and to permit non-standard disclosure where agreed, subject to later determination if agreement was absent.