Duty of care owed by emergency services

Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police [2024] UKSC 33

The Supreme Court has determined an appeal against a decision of the Court of Appeal on a preliminary matter concerning the question of whether police officers responding to an accident on black ice owed a duty to road users who afterwards drove on the same patch of black ice. The issue was whether the Court of Appeal had erred in finding that the police did not owe road users a duty of care to protect the other road users from harm. The Supreme Court revisited some fundamental principles of the law of negligence, clarified the difficult concept of liability in negligence for omissions, focusing on the notion of "not making things worse" and concluding that claimants needed to prove that the defendant knew or ought to have known, (based on reasonable foresight), what the consequences of their conduct would be. Furthermore, the court made it clear that the law in this area is now settled and is no longer in a state of flux.