Cases

BBC v Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council, X and Y

Facts

The BBC intended to identify social workers involved in a case of alleged child abuse in Rochdale in 1991. In the 1991 wardship case the Judge held that the two social workers carried out interviews with the children at the centre of the case incompetently but did not name them. Several of the children, as adults, waived their privacy and gave interviews to the BBC for a documentary and wanted to name the social workers in question and show footage of the interviews. The council applied for an injunction to restrain the BBC from identifying the social workers on the basis that they and their families would be harmed personally and professionally and they had a reasonable expectation of privacy arising out of their anonymisation in 1991. They also argued that problems of recruitment of social workers in child protection cases would be exacerbated by the naming of experts in such cases.

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