Good Law Project Ltd v Reform UK Party Ltd

On an application to strike out or obtain summary judgment, the court should not conduct a mini-trial or a detailed examination of disputed facts. Strike-out requires a case that is legally unwinnable, misconceived or clearly abusive. Summary judgment requires no real prospect of success, but an arguable claim raising genuine factual disputes should proceed to trial. A representative body under Article 80 of the UK GDPR need not be constituted as a charity or community interest company, nor must data protection be an express constitutional object. A political motive does not itself make a properly pleaded representative claim an abuse of process.

Good Law Project Limited brought representative proceedings under Article 80 of the UK GDPR on behalf of 51 individuals. It alleged that Reform UK Party Limited had failed to answer their data subject access requests within the prescribed time and that its later responses were deficient, causing non-material damage.

Reform applied to strike out the claim under CPR r 3.4(2)(a) and (b), or for summary judgment under CPR r 24.2. It disputed Good Law Project’s standing and mandates, the sufficiency of the pleaded case, and whether the proceedings were abusive or had any real prospect of success. The central issue was whether those matters could properly be determined without a trial.

1. Application refused. None of the grounds for strike-out or summary judgment was made out.
2. For CPR r 3.4(2)(a), the threshold was higher than the summary-judgment test. Strike-out required a case that was unwinnable on the merits, misconceived or bound to fail as a matter of law. Under CPR r 3.4(2)(b), abuse of process concerned use of the court process for a purpose or in a way significantly different from its ordinary and proper use. Abuse should be found only in clear and obvious cases.
3. The court should not conduct a mini-trial or a minute and protracted examination of the facts. Summary judgment required a realistic, more than fanciful, prospect of success. Genuine factual disputes concerning the mandates, DSAR compliance and non-material damage were matters for trial.
4. Good Law Project had a reasonable basis for establishing at trial that it satisfied Data Protection Act 2018, section 187(3) and (4). Its constitutional provisions could reasonably be read as requiring application of income and capital to charitable or public purposes, preventing profit distributions and pursuing objectives in the public interest. Reasonable payments to directors or connected persons for goods, services, benefits or insurance were not necessarily inconsistent with those requirements.
5. Section 187 did not require a representative body to be a charity, a community interest company or any other particular legal form. It did not require data protection to be an express constitutional object. Evidence that Good Law Project was active in protecting data subjects’ rights raised a factual issue suitable for trial.
6. The pleaded allegations concerning delayed and inadequate DSAR responses and possible non-material damage were sufficiently particular and non-speculative. A political motive, even if established, did not convert a claim seeking to enforce data subjects’ rights into an abuse of process.

First-instance decision. No prior appellate decision is stated in the judgment.