Serious Harm Threshold

Section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013 provides that a statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant. This raised the bar for bringing a defamation claim in England and Wales, requiring claimants to show a real and demonstrable impact on reputation rather than simply that the statement was capable, in the abstract, of lowering them in the estimation of right-thinking members of society.

For a body that trades for profit, the test is stricter still. The Act provides that harm to the reputation of a body that trades for profit is not 'serious harm' unless it has caused, or is likely to cause, the body serious financial loss. A corporate claimant therefore cannot rely on injury to reputation in the abstract — it must be able to point to, or reasonably anticipate, quantifiable financial damage flowing from the publication.