Martins v Brent and NYAS: High Court strikes out £1m litigant-in-person claims as abuse of process

The High Court has struck out two related claims brought by a litigant in person against the London Borough of Brent and the National Youth Advocacy Service (NYAS), in a judgement that offers a useful illustration of how courts approach claims that amount to a collateral attack on family court decisions.

In Patrick Martins v The London Borough of Brent & Ors and the linked claim against NYAS and others [2026] EWHC 1408 (KB), Deputy Master Marzec considered strike-out and summary judgement applications arising from the same underlying dispute: a contested occupation order and child arrangements proceedings in which the claimant's contact with his child had been restricted by the family court.

The claimant, acting in person, brought two claims totalling roughly £250,000 each, alleging breaches of Articles 6 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, negligence, defamation, and, in the NYAS claim, complicity in fraud upon the court and bias. He sought damages for harm to himself and to his child arising from reports and conduct during the family proceedings.

The judgement is notable for the clarity with which it dismantles claims of this kind on three separate grounds, any one of which would have been sufficient.

First, the pleadings failed at the most basic level. The Particulars of Claim treated the individual defendants as an undifferentiated group, with no attempt to identify what each person was alleged to have done, in what capacity, or when. The Deputy Master found this fatal in itself, particularly given that one of the NYAS defendants was a barrister in independent practice with an entirely different role from her co-defendants.

That barrister's position raised a second point of wider interest: advocate's immunity. The judgement confirms, following the recent Court of Appeal authority XGY v Chief Constable of Sussex Police [2025] EWCA Civ 1230, that immunity for conduct connected with advocacy extends even to allegations involving dishonesty or bad faith. Practitioners advising on claims against barristers arising from courtroom conduct will find this a useful, recent confirmation of the scope of that protection.

Third, and most significant for the wider litigation landscape, the court found both claims to be an abuse of process as collateral attacks on the family court's welfare determinations. Applying Allsop v Banner Jones Ltd [2021] EWCA Civ 7, the Deputy Master held that allowing the claims to proceed would require the King's Bench Division to assess whether the family court would have reached different conclusions but for the defendants' alleged conduct, a course that would undermine the finality of family proceedings and risk destabilising the child involved.

The negligence claims also failed on settled principle, with Poole Borough Council v GN [2019] UKSC 25 cited as authority that local authorities do not generally owe a common law duty of care in the exercise of their Children Act 1989 functions absent a specific assumption of responsibility, none of which was pleaded here.

Perhaps most striking is the broader context. The judgement notes that the claimant has issued claims totalling around £1 million across multiple KBD actions, all connected to the same family proceedings, and that an Extended Civil Restraint Order has already been made against him in the Family Court for persistently issuing meritless applications. The Deputy Master expressly linked these claims to that same pattern of conduct.

For those advising clients who find themselves on the receiving end of satellite litigation following acrimonious family proceedings, the judgement provides a clear template: inadequate pleading against individual defendants, advocate's immunity, and abuse of process via collateral attack each offer a route to early disposal, without the need to engage with the substantive merits of the underlying allegations at all.