Spring v Guardian Assurance plc [1994] UKHL 7
Employer in breach of duty of care by negligently providing defamatory reference
Facts
The plaintiff was dismissed from his job as a company sales representative for the first defendant. Upon seeking employment with another company, he received an unfavourable reference from the first defendant and the new employer refused to appoint him. At trial, the judge held that the defendants had been under a duty of care to the plaintiff and the reference given had been a negligent misstatement.
Issues
The Court of Appeal rejected the plaintiff’s case in negligence on the basis that untrue statements in references are within the preserve of the tort of defamation and that the tort of negligence should not intrude. In the House of Lords, the plaintiff argued that the law of negligence ought to develop over time. Lord Keith of Kinkel observed that the key question was whether a defamatory reference invokes liability in negligence to the subject of the reference if it is compiled without reasonable care.
Decision/Outcome
The House of Lords allowed the plaintiff’s appeal. An employer who provides a reference in respect of an employee to a prospective new employer owes a duty of care to the employee in respect of preparation of the reference. If the employer breaches this duty then they are liable in damages for the economic loss suffered by the employee as a result. Lord Woolf noted that it was necessary to extend the law of negligence in this way because the law of defamation does not provide an adequate remedy in circumstances where damage is caused to an employee by a reference which, due to negligence is, inaccurate. This is because the law of defamation requires the establish of malice and not simply negligence.
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Updated 20 March 2026
This case summary remains broadly accurate. Spring v Guardian Assurance plc [1994] UKHL 7 is good law and continues to be the leading authority for the proposition that an employer owes a duty of care to an employee when preparing an employment reference. The core holding — that a negligently prepared reference can give rise to liability in negligence for pure economic loss — has not been overturned and is regularly applied by courts and cited in academic and professional legal materials.
One point of clarification worth noting: the summary states that defamation requires proof of malice. More precisely, qualified privilege (which typically applies to employment references) can be defeated by proof of malice, but the wider point the article makes — that defamation did not offer an adequate remedy on the facts and that negligence was therefore required — remains a fair summary of the reasoning. Students should be aware that the interplay between negligence and defamation in this context is nuanced.
The principle from Spring has been developed in subsequent case law, including McKie v Swindon College [2011] EWHC 469 (QB), which extended the duty to cover references given after employment had ended in certain circumstances. Students should also note that employers now operate in a wider statutory and regulatory context affecting references, including data protection obligations under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, which were not in force at the time of the decision but are relevant to the modern practice of giving and receiving references.
