High Court rejects Reform’s bid to throw out our challenge

Reform’s attempt to strike out Good Law Project’s High Court claim has comprehensively failed, the High Court has today ruled. Each and every one of the arguments advanced by Reform UK Party Limited was rejected.

The loss makes two defeats in a day for Reform, following hot on the heels of its drubbing in the Makerfield by-election.

Reform must pay our costs – £40,000 which we incurred and £140,000 to the Access to Justice Foundation in respect of our solicitors’ pro bono representation.

Before the 2024 general election, thousands of Good Law Project supporters joined our #StopTargetingMe campaign and demanded that all the major political parties level with them about their personal data – as the law requires. One thousand seven hundred and forty six individuals used Good Law Project’s tool to ask Reform to provide a copy of all the data Reform held on them – and stop processing it.

Reform failed to comply – and so we sued.

Its privacy policy baldly states an ambition “to create and maintain a profile for each registered voter in the UK”. But when it eventually responded it claimed to have no data on any of those who requested it.

What is now common ground – Richard Tice MP originally swore a statement to the contrary which he then admitted was wrong – is that Reform uses a powerful voter targeting tool called NationBuilder. It can be used to ‘micro-target’ voters by scraping social media and commercial databases and building deep profiles of voters.

So what happened to the data? 

In his submissions to the High Court Philip Coppel KC for Reform mooted his client was entitled to delete data it held at the time a subject access request was made and provide only the data it held at the time of compliance. If this is Reform’s position it would be remarkable – and almost certainly wrong. However, we believe the truth is likely to be otherwise.  

The case will now proceed to trial – but we need help to pay the costs of this very expensive litigation. And Reform will have to account to the High Court and the public about what is happening to the voter data it is so studiously gathering.

For transparency, we are publishing legal documents on this case below:

• Claimant’s Particulars of Claim
• GLP Skeleton Argument
• Reform Skeleton Argument
• Defendant’s Response to Request for Further Information
• Exhibit DMC1
• Exhibit JTDM1
• Exhibit JTDM2
• First Witness Statement of Duncan McCann
• First Witness Statement of Jolyon Maugham
• First Witness Statement of Keeley Louise Parry
• First Witness Statement of Dominic David Edward Burgess
• Second Witness Statement of Duncan McCann
• Second Witness Statement of Jolyon Maugham