That old chestnut: data protection and reputational damage reconsidered

31 July 2025

The High Court has returned to the troubled issue of data protection claims and reputational damage in Vince v Associated Newspapers, a claim about an article in the Daily Mail concerning Labour donor Dale Vince. Mr Vince previously brought a defamation claim in respect of the same article, which was struck out. He then brought a further claim under the UK GDPR, saying that the processing was unfair because the headline, which was about Labour returning funds to a different donor who had been accused of sexual harassment, was juxtaposed with a picture of hum. This was said to be unfair and to create a misleading impression about Mr Vince, who claimed for both material and non-material harm, including harm to reputation.

Associated Newspapers applied to strike out the claim as being an abuse of process, given the overlap with the failed defamation claim. Swift J accepted that the claims should have been brought together in the same proceedings, and therefore a second claim was an abuse of the court’s process. But he also considered the cross-applications for summary judgment on the fairness issue, holding that Mr Vince’s claim that the processing was unfair had no real prospect of success in any event. That involved consideration of the parallel authorities in defamation about juxtaposition of text and images (which cannot ordinarily found a defamation claim) and whether the same principles applied under the UK GDPR. While acknowledging that fairness is context specific and flexible, Swift J held that in this context, the law would be incoherent if a different standard applied to defamation as to data protection claims. He observed that it may be that ‘the ship has sailed’ on the principle of reputational damages only being available in defamation and certain other torts which are premised on the falsity of the information – a view expressed by Warby J (as he then was) in Sicri v Associated Newspapers [2021] 4 WLR 9, but that nonetheless ‘there is still every reason to ensure that the approach taken to all such claims, in whatever form they might arise should, so far as needed, be informed by the weight that attaches to established public interests.’ On that basis, applying established principles, the claim had no real prospect of success given that any ordinary reader of the article would realise Mr Vince was not being accused of sexual harassment.

In other words: you might well be able to get damages for reputation in data protection claims. But the court is not overly inclined to use data protection to broaden the protection that the law generally gives to reputation.

Further reading: Dale v Associated Newspapers [2025] EWHC 1411 (KB)