Drive Time Motors Ltd v Creditsafe Business Solutions Limited

An interim injunction restraining a credit reference agency from publishing or linking county court judgments requires a serious issue to be tried. Where the evidence shows no real prospect of establishing negligence, recklessness or malice, the application fails at the merits stage. There is no standalone cause of action for publication of inaccurate or misleading business credit information. In addition, Human Rights Act 1998 section 12(3) applies where the injunction would restrain a licensed credit reference agency from publishing relevant information. The court must then be satisfied that the claimant is likely to succeed at trial. That heightened threshold was not met.

Drive Time Motors Ltd sought interim relief against Creditsafe Business Solutions Limited concerning six county court judgments appearing on its business credit profile. It sought suppression or delinking of five disputed entries, or their quarantine as disputed and exclusion from risk scoring. DTML maintained that the judgments related to Euro Trader Limited rather than DTML. Creditsafe relied on data supplied by Registry Trust Ltd and classified three entries as exact matches and three as possible matches. The central issues were whether DTML had a viable claim and whether it could satisfy the statutory and equitable requirements for interim restraint of publication.

The interim injunction application was dismissed.

1. Merits. Creditsafe had acted on information supplied by Registry Trust Ltd, which DTML did not impugn. The court observed that matching county court judgments to companies can require evaluative judgment because defendants may be named in different ways. On the evidence, including the shared address and the invoices which did not identify Euro Trader Limited, there was no real prospect of establishing negligence, recklessness or malice. The court also held that there was no standalone cause of action for publication of inaccurate or misleading business credit information. The proposed negligence claim faced the additional difficulty of the analysis in Smeaton v Equifax Plc [2013] EWCA Civ 108 at §§72–76.
2. Other interim-relief considerations. The absence of a serious issue to be tried was sufficient to dispose of the application. The court also identified the lack of evidential support for a meaningful cross-undertaking in damages and the strong pull of the status quo. Creditsafe had given cogent evidence about the consequences of suppressing relevant information from the public or prospective lenders.
3. Freedom of expression. The court held that Human Rights Act 1998 section 12(3) applied because the injunction would restrain a licensed credit reference agency from publishing relevant information. Section 12 imposed a heightened requirement that the claimant be likely to succeed at trial. DTML’s claim came nowhere near that threshold.
4. Costs. Costs were summarily assessed at £16,250, payable within 28 days.