Prescott and three others win legal bid on phone hacking

Lord Prescott, Labour MP Chris Bryant, former Scotland Yard Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, and journalist Brendan Montague had asked a High Court judge to give them the green light for a judicial review.

The decision means that the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the first investigation into use of default mobile voicemail PINs by News of the World – which started in 2006 and led to the conviction of the paper’s royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, and investigator Glenn Mulcaire in 2007 – will now be the subject of major political scrutiny.

A fresh investigation, involving 45 detectives, was launched in January and has led to the arrests of several journalists at the newspaper and several settlements between the newspaper and high-profile claimants.

The decision to grant the review is being seen as significant development in the ongoing scandal, and it was unexpected.

The High Court judge said Lord Prescott et al had “an arguable case for seeking the relief claimed by way of judicial review”.

The four, who believe they were victims of phone hacking, claim there were human rights breaches in the police handling of their cases.

The decision follows an earlier rejection of their applications by another High Court judge, who considered the cases and ruled the legal challenge “unarguable”.

Mr Justice Mitting decided in February that there was no arguable case that article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights imposed an obligation on the Met to notify the claimants in 2005/2006 that they might have been the victims of unlawful phone hacking.

He also concluded that it was not arguable that the commissioner was under a duty to conduct an investigation into the possibility that mobile communications had been unlawfully intercepted.

Mr Paddick, who believes his phone was hacked after a tabloid story said that he had bought his partner a watch while on holiday in Australia, welcomed the decision, telling Channel 4 News that it was “the judgement we’d been hoping for and has cleared the way to find answers as to why police didn’t inform some of the victims of phone hacking”.

He added: “I remain most concerned that police did provide all of the original information that was available to them about victims.”

The applicants were seeking declarations that the police “failed to inform them they were victims”, failed to respond adequately to their requests for information, and failed to carry out an effective investigation at the time.

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Sir John Yates, who led the original inquiry, told Parliament that police had approached all known and suspected victims, yet they had failed to inform a number of people who had now been confirmed as victims.

Last Friday, Mr Justice Vos confirmed that actor Jude Law, football pundit Andy Gray, interior designer Kelly Hoppen, agent Sky Andrew, and Labour MP Chris Bryant would have their claims heard in the litigation against News of the World.