KB-2025-000703 - [2025] EWHC 2957 (KB)

Mr Speker set out the basis for the application for a strike out of Mr Baldwin’s defence in his skeleton argument and submissions before me. He noted that there were significant procedural irregularities in relation to the ways the various documents purporting to be defences have been put before the court and confusion as to what should be properly considered to be the defence in this case but ultimately submitted that none of the “defence” documents complies with the procedural requirements. Therefore, regardless of technical issues of procedure, whichever document stands as “defence” should be struck out based on the lack of substance and failure to comply with procedural requirements.

In relation to summary judgment, Mr Speker described the course of conduct particularised in the Particulars of Claim noting the escalation and the impact on the individuals targeted at the three claimants he said: “He delivers on threats – he says he will publish and he does, he says he’s going to turn up and he does turn up.” He also pointed out the pattern of escalation of the conduct describing the way the defendant expands the range of his targets when his arguments are rejected.

He submitted that it was obvious that Mr Baldwin must have known or should have known that the course of conduct was harassment pointing out the repeated correspondence from Mills & Reeve that made this clear and his refusal to direct correspondence to the named individuals as requested. In particular he pointed out that since May 2024 the defendanthas been told his actions are threatening, harassing, blackmail and that he needs to stop it and only contact named representatives of a firm of solicitors.

Finally, he says the defendant’s course of action seeks to persuade the claimants to do something they are under no obligation to do – that is to pay him monies in the millions to which he is not entitled.

Mr Speker underlined the lack of defence in any form. Insofar as Mr Baldwin is alleging fraud, he submitted that is completely denied by the claimants and that three investigations, at the LO, the SRA and by Mills & Reeves had failed to show any basis for it. He also pointed out that it is not pleaded in any event as a defence by Mr Baldwin and that truth is not a defence to a harassment claim citing Roberts v Bank of Scotland [2013] EWCA Civ 882 as authority to show that the defendant could not be justified in resorting to self-help means to achieve his goal. Ultimately, in a case such as this with no legitimate claim, he said the allegations and threats made by Mr Baldwin amount to blackmail which could never provide a defence.

Mr Baldwin also made oral submissions before me. But his submissions did not engage directly with the application for strike out or summary judgment, or indeed with the harassment claim. He simply repeated his allegations of fraud relating to the underlying dispute, expanding them to allegations about Mr Speker misleading the court in relation to the evidence. His only point, again, goes to the underlying dispute and his conviction that his daughter never signed the CCL with OWC and that the claimants are conspiring to cover up fraud by falsifying evidence. He submitted to me that “fraud trumps all” and for this reason, he says, these proceedings should be discharged because they are based on fraudulent evidence.

While I recognise that there is some crossover between the application to strike out the defence and the application for summary judgment, I will deal with the two applications in turn as I feel it is important to be clear that my decision does not turn on a mere technicality but on a full analysis of the submissions and relevant evidence provided to me.

Firstly, considering the application to strike out the defence, I have borne in mind the fact that Mr Baldwin is a litigant in person representing himself in what are undoubtedly complex proceedings. I have therefore allowed some latitude in the way Mr Baldwin presented his case before me and have not applied an overly technical approach to my assessment of the documents submitted as a “defence” in considering the application to strike out. Indeed, Mr Speker took a similarly pragmatic approach in his submissions and did not overly rely on procedural technicalities in his submissions before me.

Mr Baldwin has, over the course of the proceedings, submitted four documents with the word ‘Defence’ in the title. The first predates the Particulars of Claim and therefore could not possibly address the allegations set out therein in any way that could comply with the rules. I have therefore not considered this document as a defence for the purposes of the strike out application.

The second and third documents were submitted on the 16^th and 17^th April 2025 but they do not include any clear direct reference to the specific allegations of harassment contained in the Particulars of Claim as required for a defence by CPR 16.5. Instead, they repeat the allegations of fraud related to the underlying dispute that Mr Baldwin believes are central to the case.

The final document that was submitted as a defence was dated 10 October 2025. This fourth defence again fails to engage at all with the details of the particulars of claim and continues to refer to the allegations of fraud against the claimants. It does not even amount to a bare denial as it does not really engage with the harassment claim itself.

In this case, I need to decide whether Mr Baldwin has complied with the requirements of CPR 16.5 in his defence. In his submissions before me, Mr Baldwin was unable to clarify which defence he sought to rely upon. However, a litigant in person must comply with a rule, practice direction or order that applies to them in the same way as a represented party: Barton v Wright Hassall LLP[2018] UKSC 12; [2018] 1 W.L.R. 1119, [18]. This is vital to upholding the rule of law and to respect for the overriding objective. Without it, parties are unable to properly respond to the case against them and proceedings may become unnecessarily drawn out with escalating costs that cannot be justified.

Despite the absence of an application to amend, and the lack of clarity in the submissions, I have considered the contents of the defence of 10 October 2025 along with the earlier documents before reaching my conclusions on the application to strike out. In my assessment of the various documents put forward as a defence, none of them comes anywhere close to fulfilling the procedural requirements.

This is not merely a technicality. None of the defence documents addresses the allegations in the Particulars of Claim or the course of conduct that is the basis of the harassment claim as required. Instead of responding to the specific pleaded points relating to his conduct in February and March 2025, or indeed the build-up to the course of conduct over the preceding four years, Mr Baldwin seeks, instead, to continue his arguments about the underlying dispute. He does not deny the allegations of harassment in his submissions, he simply ignores them and continues to expand the pattern of harassment with further completely unfounded allegations of fraud against the claimants’ representatives during these proceedings.

The statements of case submitted by Mr Baldwin are, in my view, clearly of the type highlighted by Teare J on CPR 3.4(2)(b) in Towler v Wills [2010] EWHC 1209 (Comm), [16] - that is “unreasonably vague and incoherent” and they must be considered “an abuse of the Court’s process and [...] likely to obstruct the just disposal of the case”.

Having considered written and oral submissions from Mr Baldwin it is obvious that he will not be in a position to address that defect and plead a concise and clear statement of the facts on which he relies in his defence.

In these circumstances it is impossible for the claimants to understand any basis for the defence in this claim and I therefore strike out the defence. For the purposes of this judgment, I take the Defence of 10 October 2025 to be the pleaded defence as this appears to have been filed in response to the defects identified in the earlier documents. But my findings apply equally to the documents submitted on 16 and 17 April 2025.

Turning then to the application for summary judgment. I have applied the principles set out in Easyair to my assessment of the case. In my view the claimants clearly have a realistic prospect of success.

The particulars of claim set out a course of conduct that undoubtedly amounts to harassment. The constant barrage of increasingly angry, threatening and abusive emails with an ever-expanding range of addressees and ever-increasing financial demands must have been extremely distressing for the recipients. His aggressive attendance at claimants’ premises made it clear that he was prepared to deliver on his threats.

The claim was brought earlier this year when the scale of Mr Baldwin’s actions escalated as he became increasingly angry and unreasonable. But for the claimants, the course of action complained of is only the latest chapter in a pattern of threatening and aggressive behaviour over the past four years, starting with OWC and gradually expanding to cover Travelers and Mills & Reeve as they became involved as professionals to try to resolve the underlying dispute and ultimately to stop the escalating harassment.

The Particulars of Claim set out what is undeniably “a persistent and deliberate course of unacceptable and oppressive conduct, targeted at another person, which is calculated to and does cause that person alarm, fear or distress” as described by Nicklin J in Hayden. The level of seriousness of the behaviour is, at this stage, well beyond irritating, upsetting or annoying. Employees and those associated with the claimants have had to call the police when Mr Baldwin has carried out his conduct in person at their offices and the constant bombardment with threatening and abusive emails with such serious allegations has undoubtedly caused them distress and anxiety. To be publicly accused of fraud and corruption and to be unable to escape the constant slew of threats is intolerable.

Mr Baldwin was aware, or should have been aware, that his behaviour amounted to harassment. The fact that the claimants had previously had to resort to calling the police when he turned up at their offices was a clear signal that his approach was causing distress. And Mills & Reeve had told him, in terms, by correspondence, in case there was any doubt.

There is nothing reasonable in Mr Baldwin’s approach and it is clear that nothing short of an injunction was going to stop him from continuing his harassing behaviour against an ever-widening pool of professionals.

I have considered the witness statements of Judy O’Neill of Travelers and David Gooding of Mills & Reeve which exhibit the string of emails sent by Mr Baldwin over the relevant period. Mr Baldwin does not deny that the emails complained of were sent by him or that he turned up at the claimants’ offices as alleged. While I have not conducted a “mini trial” it is clear on the papers before me that there is substance to the factual assertions of harassment made and, indeed, the defendant does not dispute them.

Mr Baldwin’s central submission is a call for more evidence relating to the underlying dispute. He wants a fraud trial. I note, however, that the SRA, in its letter of 12 October 2023 reviewing its investigation into the allegations of fraud around the CCL concluded that “we consider it unlikely that the firm would have reason to fraudulently add a client’s signature, as a CCL does not need to be signed.” Whether or not there is a “wet ink” CCL, as demanded by Mr Baldwin again before me, is not crucial to the underlying dispute. A signed CCL is simply not a requirement.

More importantly, the veracity of any signature on the CCL would not be relevant to the claim for harassment or for the applications before me. This is because, even if what he says about the underlying dispute were to be true, which I do not accept based on the evidence I have seen, in particular the conclusions of the SRA, truth would not be a defence to the harassment claim.

In Merlin Entertainments PLC at [40] Laing J (as she then was) explained:

“Harassment can take different forms. Where the harassment which is alleged involves statements which a defendant will seek to justify at trial, there may be cases where an interim injunction will be appropriate. These are cases where such statements are part of the harassment which is relied on, but where that harassment has additional elements of oppression, persistence or unpleasantness, which are distinct from the content of the statements. An example might be a defendant who pursues an admitted adulterer through the streets for a lengthy period, shouting "You are an adulterer" through a megaphone. The fact that the statement is true, and could and would be justified at trial, would not necessarily prevent the conduct from being harassment, or prevent a court from restraining it at an interlocutory stage. The same point would apply to Howlett, if the banners flown from aircraft for several years over the claimant's house, instead of conveying abuse, had set out truthful allegations. [...]”

This is particularly important in this case as Mr Baldwin’s submissions all centre on the allegations which he says he wants a separate court to consider. Aidan Eardley KC sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge put the same point succinctly in Pattinson v Winsor[2024] EWHC 1910 (KB) at [43]:

“… truth is not a defence to a claim in harassment… The communication of well-founded allegations to a body with a proper interest in receiving and investigating them is unlikely to be harassment, but the relentless scatter-gun repetition of allegations to all and sundry is likely to be harassment even if there were some truth in what is being said.”

The defendant has not pleaded the defence that his actions were pursued for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime. In any event, his allegations of fraud relate to the underlying dispute which occurred several years ago and for which he says he already has evidence so his ongoing conduct could not be described as being for the prevention or detection of crime. The kind of self-help methods he has resorted to, including threatening behaviour and blackmail could never be justified in the pursuit of crime in any event. If he was concerned about fraud, he should have reported that to the police and left it at that.

He may have started out in 2021 wishing to seek justice for his daughter when he complained to OWC and then to the Legal Ombudsman and the SRA. But the emails and conduct complained about in February and March of 2025 are clearly designed to extract ever increasing amounts of money from the claimants to make the harassment stop. They are tantamount to blackmail.

Mr Baldwin has had the underlying dispute investigated by the Legal Ombudsman, the SRA and Mills & Reeves. They have all found there is nothing to evidence fraud. He is not happy with the outcomes of those investigations and clearly feels aggrieved. That is not an excuse for launching such a sustained campaign of harassment and none of this can provide any defence to the claim that is the subject of these proceedings.

He accepts that he sent the emails complained of and that he went to the claimants’ offices as they say he did. He says nothing to deny the course of conduct set out in the Particulars of Claim. Therefore, I cannot see that any fuller investigation or further evidence would affect the outcome of these proceedings at trial.

The way in which Mr Baldwin has bombarded the claimants with threats and entirely unfounded allegations by email, his follow up on his threats attending the claimants’ offices when he has been clearly told not to and his increasingly oppressive demands for money backed by threats to spread his baseless allegations more broadly to the media and regulators are very clearly not reasonable.

This is a case where I should clearly “grasp the nettle” and decide the claim now. Mr Baldwin simply has no defence in law. To allow the proceedings to continue in such circumstances would be unjust to both parties and against the overriding objective as it would simply serve to use up court time and incur greater legal costs when the outcome is already obvious. I therefore grant summary judgment for the claimants.