Cobija Sintes v Tower Hamlets: licensing a market does not mean owning its risks

A heavily pregnant woman trips over scaffolding poles left by an unidentified market trader in a busy London street market and breaks her ankle. The local authority that runs the market had its own inspection procedures and knew that traders sometimes left hazards on the footpath. Surely it must bear some responsibility? The Court of Appeal has given a firm answer: no.

The facts in Cobija Sintes v London Borough of Tower Hamlets are hard to read without sympathy for the claimant. Eva Cobija Sintes was 36 weeks pregnant when she tripped over poles protruding from a trolley in Whitechapel Market in December 2019 at around five in the afternoon. The poles, components of a market stall, had been left unattended in the gap between two pitches by a trader who was never identified. Tower Hamlets was the licensing authority for the market under the London Local Authorities Act 1990, though the highway itself was the responsibility of Transport for London. It was not suggested that Tower Hamlets placed the poles there or occupied the market area.

The Deputy District Judge at first instance found for Ms Cobija Sintes, concluding both that Tower Hamlets owed her a duty of care and that it had breached that duty by failing to inspect adequately. He placed considerable weight on Tower Hamlets' Standard Operating Procedures and Processes for Market Officers, which set out detailed inspection requirements across several time slots throughout the day, including a late shift running from 2.45 pm to 6.00 pm. The DDJ found, on the balance of probabilities, that the poles had been in position since at least 2.45 pm and that Tower Hamlets' failure to detect and remove them was a breach of its own procedures and a breach of duty.

The Court of Appeal disagreed on every material point, and the reasoning deserves attention.

On duty of care, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith applied the framework recently affirmed by the Supreme Court in Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police [2024] UKSC 33. The fundamental distinction is between making things worse, which readily attracts liability, and failing to confer a benefit by protecting someone from harm caused by a third party, which generally does not. Whatever the detail of Tower Hamlets' licensing conditions and inspection procedures, what was really being complained of was a failure to do more to prevent harm caused by the unidentified trader. The baseline question is what would have happened if Tower Hamlets had done nothing at all: the trader would still have been free to leave the poles where they did, and nothing suggests they would have acted any differently. The existence of detailed internal procedures, however conscientiously drafted, does not alter that analysis. As Stuart-Smith LJ put it, the decision in East Suffolk would have been the same whether or not the council had a manual telling it how to respond.

Neither of the recognised exceptions rescued the claim. There was no assumption of responsibility: Tower Hamlets had no meaningful relationship with Ms Cobija Sintes, let alone one involving the kind of assurance or undertaking seen in Kent v Griffiths. Nor did Tower Hamlets have the level of control over individual traders that would bring it within the Dorset Yacht exception. The power to revoke licences and issue enforcement notices is emphatically not the same as the close physical supervision of known offenders.

The factual finding on timing was also picked apart. The DDJ had concluded the poles were present from 2.45 pm on the basis that traders sometimes left early and that no inspection had been carried out after that time. The Court of Appeal identified these as non-sequiturs. The absence of an inspection after 2.45 pm is, if anything, consistent with the poles not having been there at that time. Nothing in the evidence established when the poles were deposited, and the gap could have been minutes rather than hours.

The nuisance claim fared no better. Tower Hamlets had not placed the poles there and had not permitted their placement in any meaningful sense: the licence conditions expressly forbade exactly what the trader did. And without knowing how long the poles had been present, it was impossible to show that Tower Hamlets had adopted or continued the nuisance through having had knowledge and a reasonable opportunity to abate it.

Lady Justice Yip and Lord Justice Bean both agreed on the outcome and added a pointed observation: this was a multi-track case of real legal complexity that should have been tried by a Circuit Judge. The allocation decision deserves scrutiny.

Eva Cobija Sintes v London Borough of Tower Hamlets [2026] EWCA Civ 752, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith, Lady Justice Yip and Lord Justice Bean, 17 June 2026.