KDY v Nicholas Langham: High Court strikes out 300-page claim against eleven defendants

The High Court has struck out in its entirety a wide-ranging claim brought by a litigant in person on behalf of her disabled son against eleven defendants, including schools, a local authority, an NHS trust and a housing association, finding the claim unsustainable both on its merits and in its form.

In KDY & Anor v Nicholas Langham & Ors [2026] EWHC 2068 (KB), Clare Padley, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, ruled on four separate strike out and summary judgement applications brought by groups of defendants against a claim issued on behalf of KDY, a thirteen-year-old boy with an Education, Health and Care Plan, autism and significant social, emotional and mental health needs, and his mother, NGP, who represented herself throughout.

The claim, running to some 300 pages and 1,009 paragraphs, sought damages exceeding £2.8 million, later reframed as £1.84 million sought jointly and severally, spanning negligence, personal injury, clinical negligence, discrimination and harassment under the Equality Act 2010, misfeasance in public office, defamation and breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights. The defendants included former head teachers sued personally, four school governing bodies, Tower Hamlets council, East London NHS Foundation Trust, a housing association running a youth centre, and the London Legacy Development Corporation, whose joinder remained disputed at the hearing.

The judge worked through the claim head by head. The Equality Act claims were struck out for want of jurisdiction, since such claims fall to the county court under section 114 of that Act, and were in any event out of time. Human Rights Act claims were largely time-barred under the twelve-month limit in section 7(5), and, considered on their merits regardless, none of the pleaded facts came close to the thresholds required for breaches of Articles 2, 3, 6, 8 or 14. Claims of "stigmatisation" were dismissed as not amounting to a recognised cause of action, while the mother's personal injury claim as a secondary victim was struck out following the Supreme Court's decision in Paul v Wolverhampton, which the judge found precluded such claims arising from cumulative institutional conduct rather than a discrete traumatic event witnessed directly.

Claims of misfeasance in public office failed to meet the high threshold set in Three Rivers DC v Bank of England, and education-related claims against defendants other than the local authority were struck out as misconceived, since the relevant statutory duty rests with the council alone. Parts of the claim overlapping with an earlier judicial review, in which permission had already been refused, were struck out as an abuse of process.

Beyond the individual causes of action, the judge found the particulars of claim themselves fundamentally non-compliant with CPR 16.4's requirement for a concise statement of facts, describing the document, supplemented by various "matrix" and "navigation" aids filed by the claimant, as needlessly prolix and effectively impossible for the defendants to answer proportionately. Even the one claim with some potential merit, a clinical negligence claim on behalf of the child alone, was found inadequately particularised, though the judge left open the possibility of a properly pleaded version being brought in future given the child's age.

The entire claim was dismissed against all defendants, with the judge expressing sympathy for the mother's caring responsibilities while endorsing an earlier suggestion that a collaborative rather than litigious approach might better serve the child's future needs.