Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Related legal acts

Key definition

Causation definition

What does Causation mean? Causation describes how the law links a person’s conduct to a harmful outcome, so as to establish liability in negligence and other torts/delicts, or guilt in criminal offences. - Factual causation: usually the ‘but for’ test—would the loss or injury have occurred but for the defendant’s act or omission? In limited circumstances, courts accept material contribution to harm or a material increase in risk (notably for indivisible diseases), and address multiple concurrent or successive causes. - Legal causation (scope of liability/remoteness): whether the kind of damage was reasonably foreseeable and whether any novus actus interveniens broke the chain of causation. The thin...

Professional negligence: scope of duty, causation and remoteness beyond SAAMCO - guidance post-Manchester Building Society and Khan v Meadows

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Practice notes

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In analysing the Causation and Remoteness aspects of a professional Negligence claim

When evaluating causation and remoteness in professional negligence, a sensible point of departure is the pair of 2021 Supreme Court authorities, Manchester Building society v Grant Thornton (accountants’ negligence) and Khan v Meadows (clinical negligence). In both, heard by the same constitution, the court indicated that adopting the analysis set out below provides a structured way to examine the scope‑of‑duty principle, “but for” causation, and the foreseeability of harm within clinical negligence claims. The result of that exercise informs the proper extent of the claimant’s damages, consistent with the compensatory principle that the law, so far as money can, seeks to place the claimant in the position he or she would have occupied had the defendant not been negligent (Khan at para [58]). The analysis (at para [6] of Manchester, reproduced at para [28] of Khan) involves posing and answering the following questions:

Is the harm (loss, injury and damage) which is the subject of the claim actionable in negligence?...

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Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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