Alcock v. Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police

Facts

• The Hillsborough disaster involved a crush at a football stadium causing numerous deaths and injuries. Various claimants, including relatives who watched the disaster unfold on live television, and others present or arriving shortly after, sought damages for nervous shock. The claims varied significantly in the claimants' relationship to victims and manner of witnessing.

Issue

1. Whether claimants who witnessed the disaster's aftermath only through television broadcast, rather than direct personal presence, satisfy the proximity requirements for secondary victim recovery.

Held

• The McLoughlin proximity requirements (relationship, physical and temporal proximity, direct perception) were reaffirmed and applied. Claimants who witnessed events only through television broadcast did not satisfy the direct perception requirement, since broadcast mediates and distances the experience. Some claimants also failed the relationship requirement due to insufficiently close ties. Recovery was denied to those failing these requirements, while remaining available to those satisfying the full test.

Ratio Decidendi

Genuine direct perception of an event or its immediate aftermath through the claimant's own unaided senses is required for secondary victim recovery; perception through mediated broadcast, however distressing, does not satisfy this requirement, given its qualitatively different, distanced character from direct personal presence.