King's / Queen's Bench Division of the High Court

KB-2022-003316 - [2025] EWHC 2573 (KB)

Fecha: 10-Oct-2025

D: The second strike out Application – the Ward Allegations

D: The second strike out Application – the Ward Allegations

28.

Associated issued a separate Application Notice, also on 10 September 2025, seeking to strike out the part of the Claimants’ Particulars of Claim that alleges that Associated’s UIG included commissioning “burglaries to order”. Despite use of the plural, the only alleged instance of this form of UIG is an allegation that, in 1992, two Mail on Sunday journalists, Lawrence Lever and Clive Wolman, had burgled the home of Michael Ward and stolen some documents (“the Ward Allegations”). The Ward Allegations are relevant only to the generic case.

29.

Associated sought to strike out the Ward Allegations from the Particulars of Claim at the First CMH. At that stage, I refused the Application. In a judgment given at the First CMH, I held:

[17] I can understand the Defendant’s concerns about the proportionality of litigating this incident. It is potentially quite divorced from the focus of the rest of the litigation. The Court will need to keep this area of the case under review going forward. If the costs of litigating this issue become wholly disproportionate, the Court may need to think again whether the potential probative value of the allegation is worth the cost of investigating and resolving it. It would be premature, however, to exclude it from consideration at this stage.

[18] In my judgment, it is likely that disclosure provided by the Defendant in relation to this allegation is likely to shed light as to whether it really is capable of supporting the Claimants’ generic claim. I am satisfied that at this stage it would be wrong to exclude it as a matter of case management.

[19] My conclusion therefore is that [the Ward Allegations] cannot be excluded on the basis that, even assumed true, it is not probative. And it cannot, in my judgment, properly be excluded on case management grounds at this stage. It will be something that, I suspect, the Court will need to come back to after the phase of disclosure has been completed, but for those reasons I refuse the Defendant’s application.

30.

By the second strike out Application, Associated contends that:

(1)

the Ward Allegations, because they are relied upon as propensity evidence, are incapable of providing any evidential support for each of the Claimants’ claims because Mr Lever and Mr Wolman are not alleged to have played any part with any Pleaded Article; or, in the alternative,

(2)

amendments made to the Reply concerning the Ward Allegations are inconsistent with the case that is advanced in the Particulars of Claim (contrary to CPR 16 PD §9.2); and, in any event

(3)

resolution of the Ward Allegations would be disproportionate to the evidential value of what they could prove in relation to the Claimants’ claims.