What happened: The Court of Appeal ruled QBE owes nothing after a security firm failed to report an assault claim for nearly three years
Who’s involved: QBE Insurance (Europe) Limited and Protec Security Group Limited
What’s at stake: Full indemnity for a stroke victim’s unassessed damages
Why it matters: “Will entitle us to refuse” creates an absolute right to decline cover, not a discretion requiring rational grounds
Where it stands: Appeal dismissed, October 27, 2026
A customer got up from a headlock outside a bar in Oldham, walked away, and took a taxi home. Two days later, he had a stroke.
More than nine years on, the Court of Appeal has ruled that the security company’s public liability insurer does not have to pay. The reason has nothing to do with what happened that night – and everything to do with what did not happen next.
The incident took place on August 6, 2017, at the Muse Bar and Restaurant. Two door supervisors engaged by Protec Security Group Limited ejected the customer from the bar. In an altercation outside, one of them forced him to the ground and held him in a headlock. The customer stood up immediately, walked away, and went home. When his mother found him unwell two days later, an ambulance was called. He had suffered a stroke, leaving him with partial blindness, neck trauma, and speech difficulties.
Police investigated and closed the case in September 2019, finding insufficient evidence of unlawful assault. But in the civil claim that followed, a High Court judge found in July 2023 that the stroke was caused by the door supervisor’s assault and entered judgment against Protec for damages to be assessed.
By that point, Protec had gone into liquidation. The customer turned to QBE Insurance (Europe) Limited – Protec’s public liability insurer - under the Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act 2010. The Act lets an injured party claim directly against an insolvent company’s insurer, effectively stepping into the insured’s shoes.
QBE said no.
The timeline is what sinks the claim. Protec’s sole director was on annual leave when the incident happened. On his return, police contacted him and he handed over documents - but he never told QBE.
In October 2019, the customer’s solicitors sent a letter of claim flagging catastrophic injuries to the restaurant, which forwarded it to Protec’s director in December 2019 with a note urging him to contact his insurer. He did not. A direct letter of claim reached Protec in June 2020. Still nothing went to QBE.
The first QBE heard of any of it was an email from the customer’s solicitors on July 8, 2020 - nearly three years after the headlock.
Protec’s director explained that because police had cleared his staff, “there was no case to answer, so no claim or further action was identified at the time.” QBE declined cover in December 2020.
The policy required Protec to notify its broker of any incident that “may give rise to a claim” within 30 days, and to forward any claim-related correspondence immediately. Breach, the policy stated, “will entitle us to refuse to deal with the relevant claim.”
The customer’s legal team argued that this gave QBE a discretion, not an absolute right - one that had to be exercised on rational grounds. Since QBE could not point to any actual harm from the late notification, it should not be allowed to walk away.
The Court of Appeal, in a judgment handed down on October 27, 2026, rejected this across the board. The phrase “will entitle us to refuse” was unqualified and clear. It operated as a condition precedent – meaning that once breached, QBE’s obligation to pay simply fell away. No need to show that the delay caused any harm.
The court also tackled when the 30-day notification window opened. It accepted that no reasonable insured would have expected a claim at the moment the customer walked away apparently unharmed. But that was not the end of it. Once Protec’s director learned - on his return from holiday, well within the 30-day window - that police wanted to interview his door staff about an incident in which someone had allegedly been injured, the duty to notify kicked in. He did not act on it.
The ruling drew a line between this case and a 2016 Court of Appeal decision, Zurich Insurance v Maccaferri, where a similar notification clause was read more narrowly. Three things set the QBE policy apart: a hard 30-day deadline instead of an open-ended obligation, a lower bar for reporting (“may” rather than “likely” to give rise to a claim), and no requirement to provide detailed particulars at the time of notification.
The customer’s damages have never been assessed. The coverage question is now settled against him.
The decision raises the stakes around late notification for any insured operating under claims conditions with hard deadlines and low reporting thresholds and makes clear that where a policy says the insurer is “entitled to refuse,” it means exactly that.
