Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Related legal acts

Key definition

Breach of statutory duty definition

What does Breach of statutory duty mean? In practice, breach of statutory duty describes a civil claim that a defendant failed to comply with a duty created by legislation, and that this failure caused the kind of loss the legislation was designed to prevent. The expression is not defined in a single statute; it is developed in case law and applied across many regulatory and criminal law frameworks. The central question is legislative intention: read in context, did Parliament or the Oireachtas intend the duty to be privately enforceable? A claimant must usually show that the statute imposes a duty on the defendant; they are within the...

Civil liability for breach of statutory duty: actionability, overlap with negligence (occupiers, highways, products), and workplace health and safety claims post-1 October 2013 (ERRA 2013)

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Practice notes

Availability of a civil remedy under statute

Claims alleging Breach of statutory duty are widespread, mirroring the breadth of legislation that structures interactions between private persons and public authorities. These claims reflect the volume of statutory regulation designed to manage such relationships. While, in the workplace context, civil liability for breach of statutory duty has largely been abolished for incidents occurring on or after 1 October 2013, many significant fields still permit a civil claim for such breaches. Accordingly, extensive areas remain in which a civil remedy for breach of statutory duty is available, despite that change in the workplace context. However, not every statutory obligation carries a civil remedy. Certain enactments are introduced to adjust or elucidate pre‑existing Common law causes of action. Illustrations include statutes regulating occupiers’ civil liability. The common law principles that once governed an occupier’s duty to visitors were expressly superseded by the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957 (OLA 1957), thereby facilitating claims premised on breaches of statutory duties. In a similar vein, the Highways Act 1980 (HiA 1980) confers a remedy for breach of some, though not all, of the duties it contains...

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Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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