2025xi13, Thursday: Wrong, wrong, wrong.

After 30-odd years as a working reporter, investigator, stopper of bankers from behaving like bankers, and now lawyer, I wonder sometimes whether my ability to be surprised by idiocy that (putting it charitably) borders on the malign has been exhausted.

Good news. It hasn't.

That much was shown by the way I nearly drove off the road several times while listening to the YouTube recording of the October 2025 Court of Appeal hearing in Buzzard-Quashie v Chief Constable of Northants Police. And that was on account of me having to keep rewinding short sections because I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

The judgment, which dropped on Tuesday, is a superb primer on how civil contempt liability is meant to work. For those lucky enough to be uninitiated in this field of the law, civil contempt is all about what you do when you've obtained a court order against someone else - and they break it. (It's different, therefore, from "contempt in the face of the court", which is about wrongs such as lying on oath.) It's a weird business: a quasi-criminal offshoot of civil litigation, where you apply for someone to be held in contempt, but you do so at least in part so that the court can protect its own authority.

It has distinctly tricky procedural elements, but still trickier - as the judgment shows - is understanding exactly what someone needs to have done to be held in contempt.

In this case, a circuit judge in a county court got it plain wrong. And the Court of Appeal has put it right. (Nothwithstanding the attempt - no doubt on instruction - by counsel for the Chief Constable to suggest that the whole business should be kicked back downstairs to the same circuit judge. Even just on audio, I could hear the temperature on the bench drop about 20 degrees at that point. I could almost imagine Fraser LJ restraining himself from a plain-spoken response along the lines of: "You're having a laugh, aren't you?")

What were they thinking?

I'll come back to the details of that primer in a bit. But to really get the most of Fraser LJ's whistle-stop tour through civil contempt, the facts of this case come in useful.

And boy... what facts. Put very briefly:

• Nadine Buzzard-Quashie (Ms BQ) was arrested by Northants Police in September 2021. Three days later, she asked for the body-worn video (BWV) which she knew had to exist, from the arresting officers.
• Northants released a little bit. But over the succeeding months and years, they essentially told her there wasn't any more - or if there was, it had been deleted.
• In April 2023, after a favourable decision from the Information Commissioner, she also obtained a county court judgment requiring Northants to hand over "any and all [other] video footage", and to provide a witness statement explaining how they'd searched and why what they handed over was all they had. The order required the WS to come from a police officer, of at least the rank of inspector.
• The ordered deadline came and went. Further months passed without the force doing what it had been told to do. Ultimately, a little bit (but only a little bit) more footage emerged - and when a statement did land, months past the court-ordered deadline, it was from a member of the force's civilian staff.
• Ms BQ then sought to have the chief constable held in civil contempt for having grossly failed to comply with the 2023 order. This application failed.

So far, so unfortunate, and so fairly conventional. But this is where things go off the rails, and where my driving got worse. As the Court of Appeal was told, shortly before this October's hearing my amazing colleague and friend Charlotte Elves - who'd been working for Ms BQ pro bono, as had Marc Livingston at Janes Solicitors and leading counsel James Leonard KC (also both amazing, and also both people I'm lucky enough to call friends) - discovered by looking through more than a thousand pages of BWV audit logs that there were other recordings; that they were easily findable by reasonable searches; and that Northants had clearly either not done reasonable searches despite having said all along that they had, or had (again, putting it at its most charitable) had somehow managed to overlook the results.

(Charlotte, by the way, was warmly praised by James during the hearing; and just as warmly commended in the judgment by both Fraser LJ and Coulson LJ. The latter, incidentally, seems to be the Court of Appeal's resident contempt nerd. I stress that in my view and in this kind of context "nerd" is a compliment. Takes one to know one.)

Either way, the Chief Constable had to admit through counsel at the hearing that pretty much everything the force had saying to Ms BQ for four years, and to the court for more than two years, had been flat wrong. And that they would have known it was flat wrong had they done what the court had told them to do. Further, as Fraser LJ pointed out, they'd had been happy to take an order for costs against Ms BQ in her failed contempt proceedings - despite the fact that she'd only had to bring the proceedings because they'd utterly failed to comply with the court order, whether in a contemptuous manner or not.

Put simply: for shame.

Back to the law

If this was all there was, it'd be interesting enough from a legal and administrative perspective: a case of a public authority being held to account for having screwed up by treating a member of the public in an entirely shoddy manner. A rare moment: not the screw-up, but the being held to account.

Personally, I find it hard to forgive. The police have huge powers to do things that can fundamentally change people's lives, and they collect vast amounts of information about individuals in the process. Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018 is clear that this results in a heavy legal responsibility to handle that information with care. And particularly with BWV, which after all exists in large part to ensure transparency in how police business is conducted, a force that fails to take this responsibility seriously is a force that has simply failed. Full stop.

But the legal perspective, rather than the factual one, is where Fraser LJ's judgment really comes into its own.

Because it does three important things in relation to contempt.

Firstly, it really drives home how civil contempt works. To be honest, this shouldn't be necessary: as the judgment explains, there are now countless authorities which seek to set this out. But for anyone running a civil contempt case whether as claimant or defendant in the future, the section from paragraphs 56 to 75 describe it both clearly and in all the detail one could need. Critically:

• Civil contempt happens when someone knows of a court order telling them to do (or not do) something, and then they deliberately do (or fail to do) that thing.
• The state of mind that's needed is the knowledge of what the order requires or prohibits - and the intent to act (or fail to act).
• But there is no requirement - none at all - for there to be any intent to flout the court's authority. It doesn't matter whether the person realises that what they're doing breaches the order, or whether they're acting in blissful (or more accurately disastrous) ignorance that this is the case.

This last point is the important one. To take the example used by Fraser LJ from a previous case: if a landlord is barred by a court order from evicting someone (and knows of the order), and then goes ahead and does it anyway, it doesn't matter whether or not the landlord realised they were breaching the order, so long as the eviction itself was done deliberately; that is, someone decided to evict the tenant, whatever their reason for doing so. Saying it was (say) an administrative error will make no difference. It's still contempt. In this case, therefore, Northants were told to release all remaining footage and provide an inspector's WS; they did neither, and in each case that was the result of decisions, not inadvertence.

Secondly, it settles a rather muddier point. Some court orders carry penal notices: a warning on the front page, in bold capitals, that a breach of the order could land you in jail. Often it's thought that a breach of an order can't found liability for contempt if the order didn't carry a penal notice. Fraser LJ has given that short shrift: as he says, there aren't two classes of court order - those with a penal notice and those without. So equally it would undermine the court's ability to protect its processes (the whole point of the contempt jurisdiction) if some of its orders could be disobeyed with more impunity than others.

Interestingly, he implies that this applies with particular force to public authorities. There is an intense public interest, he says, in public authorities (which includes police forces) doing what the courts tell them to. No penal notice is needed to hold them to account if they fall short.

There's one rather odd bit here in the judgment, incidentally. At paragraph 88 Fraser LJ refers to CPR rule 81.9(1) as saying that committal - that is, imprisonment for contempt - is possible only if the order breached carries a penal notice. But this provision was in the old contempt rules, which were changed in late 2020. The current Part 81 makes no such stipulation, so it's probably wise to be cautious before relying on this to advise a defendant that committal was unlikely just because the order they'd allegedly breached didn't have a penal notice. Rather, the case of SOCA v Hymans [2011] EWHC 3599 (QB) - which Fraser LJ cites, and which the 2025 White Book quotes at 81.4.4 on page 2426 - says that as long as the court is satisfied the defendant knew of the potential consequences, committal doesn't need there to have been a penal notice.

Thirdly, and again returning to matters which really should have been clear already, Fraser LJ confirms that for some public authorities, a single person can be held responsible for screw-ups that amount to contempt. This goes for government departments, where the Secretary of State must carry the can - but it goes for police forces too, where both conventionally and in law it's the chief constable (or the commissioner, for the Met and the City force) who embodies the force.

Of course, whether that means the Chief Constable of Northants faces a real risk of getting banged up (sorry, "committed") for his force's now-evident misdeeds remains an open question. (The point in the hearing where Fraser LJ mused on this topic was another "keep-your-eyes-on-the-road" moment for me.) I think it's probably unlikely - if only because the current incumbent has been in office only since October 2023, his predecessor having been suspended (and then the following year fired) for misrepresenting his prior military service. But it's undoubtedly to the good - from the perspective of holding public authorities' feet to the fire - that their bosses should carry the can when things go wrong.

(On an allied note, and as a former BBC reporter, I won't pretend that organisation is perfect. Very, very far from it. But as a friend of mine observed this morning, it does seem to be one of the few quasi-public organisations where bosses still resign when things go wrong, rather than hanging on and blaming someone else. Something for those yelling, possibly with malign motives, about its probity problems might consider. But probably won't.)

What next?

So now we wait. A sanctions hearing is the next step - in contempt cases we don't call it "sentencing", or at least shouldn't, since this isn't about a criminal offence. That's due to take place a week from today, on the 20th of this month. I can't off-hand recall a recent case where a contempt sanction was handed down by the Court of Appeal (rather than being reviewed by it; that happens all the time, since people found to be in civil contempt can appeal either or both of sanction and liability by right, without the need to seek permission). So it's going to be fascinating.

But another question is what else Ms BQ does next. After having fought mostly single-handedly for years, with notable skill and astonishing (and praiseworthy) persistence, she may well have had enough. Somehow I doubt it, though; and few could blame her if she wanted now to press on. I don't know if she currently has any civil litigation against the Chief Constable, but offhand I can think of several potential heads of claim which arise from her treatment over the past few years.

For instance, even setting aside the claim for false imprisonment which may arise from the original arrest (and to be clear I've no idea as to the rights or wrongs of that), it does seem to me that the way Northants has handled her personal data may well give rise to a strong data protection claim - most likely under Part 3 of the DPA, but conceivably under the GDPR as well. She's probably got a good argument that she's suffered non-material harm (that is, distress even in the absence of any medically-recognised psychiatric harm) as a result of their handling of her personal data: if under part 3, it's hardly been fair (DPA s35), it's unlikely to have been accurate (DPA s38), and it's probably been insecure (DPA s40). Alternatively, if one argued that this processing - that is, the processing of Ms BQ's data for the purposes of responding to her DPA request, rather than in relation to the original arrest - wasn't law enforcement processing, then the same applies - albeit with reference to paragraphs a, d and f of GDPR article 5 instead.

As for material harm: well, I've no way of knowing. But I imagine there's a fair amount of that which can be particularised too.

I do recognise that her original claim resulting in the 2023 order was in data protection. But as I understand it, that was about getting hold of the data - and as Fraser LJ points out, she had "withdrawn the money part of her claim" in the hearing which resulted in that order, so the question of whether compensation was warranted under either GDPR article 82 or DPA s169 was never adjudicated upon and may still be open. But no-one's adjudicated at all from a data protection perspective on what happened since April 2023 - and as we've seen, there's quite a lot of that too.

Might be time to consider that question anew?