## Facts

- Seven Borstal trainees (young offenders) were taken to work on or near an island in Poole Harbour under the supervision of three Borstal officers employed by the Home Office.
- The officers left the trainees effectively unsupervised overnight, contrary to instructions.
- The trainees escaped from the island at night.
- They boarded a yacht moored nearby to facilitate their escape and damaged a yacht owned by Dorset Yacht Co. Ltd.
- The yacht owner sued the Home Office in negligence, alleging a failure to exercise reasonable care in supervising trainees who posed an obvious risk of escape and property damage in the immediate vicinity.
- Lower courts allowed the claim to proceed on the basis that a duty of care was owed; the Home Office appealed to the House of Lords.

## Issues

1. Whether the Home Office (through Borstal officers) owed a duty of care to nearby property owners regarding foreseeable harm caused by trainees under the officers’ custody and control.
2. Whether negligence liability can arise from failure to prevent intentional wrongful acts of third parties who are not the defendant’s servants.
3. Whether public policy or the statutory Borstal scheme required immunity from negligence claims arising from supervision and control of trainees.
4. Whether the trainees’ intervening criminal acts broke the chain of causation or made the loss too remote.

## Decision

- The House of Lords dismissed the Home Office’s appeal by majority (one dissent).
- The officers (and thus the Home Office) could owe a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable damage to nearby property caused by trainees in their custody and control.
- On the pleaded facts, leaving the trainees unsupervised overnight in proximity to yachts amounted to an arguable breach of that duty.
- No special public policy immunity protected the Home Office from ordinary negligence principles in these circumstances.
- The trainees’ intentional wrongdoing did not break causation where that wrongdoing was the very risk that made the lack of supervision negligent.
- Viscount Dilhorne dissented, rejecting the existence or scope of a duty to protect third-party property from trainees’ criminal acts.

## Legal Principles

- A duty of care may arise to control third parties where the defendant has custody or control over persons known to present a risk, and harm to an identifiable person or class is foreseeable.
- Liability for omissions is exceptional but may be recognized when a “special relationship” of control and responsibility exists between defendant and wrongdoer, creating a particularized risk to others.
- Public authorities are generally subject to ordinary negligence rules absent a clear statutory basis for immunity.
- Foreseeable intervening criminal acts do not necessarily sever causation when they are the kind of acts that made the defendant’s failure to take precautions unreasonable.

## Conclusion

The House of Lords held that custodians of known offenders may owe a negligence duty to nearby property owners to take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm resulting from escape and associated wrongdoing, and that public authority status does not, without statutory basis, confer immunity from such claims.


Home Off. v. Dorset Yacht Co., [1970] A.C. 1004 (H.L.)