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...

Personal injury and breach of statutory duty: identifying private rights of action, statutory interpretation tests, health and safety after ERRA 2013, and final hurdles for claimants

Published by a LexisNexis PI & Clinical Negligence expert

Practice notes

A Personal injury claim founded on a Breach of statutory duty can, in principle, be pursued against any body bound by that duty, whether a Public authority or a private organisation. However, relatively few statutory provisions actually create a cause of action in private law. The difficulty lies in pinpointing which enactments enable a claimant to bring proceedings for breach of statutory duty...

Statutory provision expressly permits claimants to bring a claim for breach of statutory duty

At times, the legislation makes it explicit that a failure to discharge the relevant obligation—whether effectively or at all—is intended to give rise to a right to sue for breach of statutory duty. Where a statute either (a) expressly confers a right of action, or (b) adjusts existing common law duties, the position is generally relatively clear. The most familiar example for personal injury practitioners is the right to recover if a claimant suffers injury due to a highway Authority’s breach of its statutory obligation to maintain the highway under section 41 of the Highways Act 1980...

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Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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