Following are situations where a duty of care exists:
There is no liability in negligence unless the claimant establishes both that they were owed a duty of care by the defendant, and that there has been a breach of that duty. The defendant is in breach of duty towards the claimant if their conduct fell short of the standard expected under the circumstances.

Muir v Glasgow Corp
A group of children were having a day out with their Sunday school. They were meant to be having a picnic, but the rain had ruined it. The leader of the trip asked the manager of a tearoom, run by Glasgow Corporation, if she would allow the children to have their picnic on their premises. She agreed and the group entered. In the tearoom there was a tuck shop, the window to which was located midway along a corridor. The children had all started to line up along the corridor to buy sweets at the tuck shop. At this time a large tea urn was being carried along the corridor by two adults, to the main room of the tearoom. For a reason which was not explained, the hold of one of the bearers slipped so that tea was spilt and scalded several children (Muir being one of them). The parents of the girl sued Glasgow Corporation, claiming that they owed the child a duty of care and that they had breached this.

The court held that the manager in charge owed a duty of care, generally, to everyone in the tearoom. However, she did not owe a duty of care to the Sunday school, to take additional precautions to prevent their being injured as a result of her allowing them to enter. So long as the tearoom was run in the same manner as it was day to day, and to the same safety standards, she was not required to take extra steps to prevent the incident which occurred. It was not reasonably foreseeable that allowing the children to come into the premises would result in one of them being scalded. As such, the incident was put down as an accident which could not have been prevented. 

Lord Macmillan said, "Legal liability is limited to those consequences of our acts which a reasonable man of ordinary intelligence and experience so acting would have in contemplation. "The duty to take care," as I essayed to formulate it in Bourhill v. Young, "is the duty to avoid doing or omitting to do anything the doing or omitting to do which may have as its reasonable and probable consequence injury to others, and the duty is owed to those to whom injury may reasonably and probably be anticipated if the duty is not observed.

Lord Macmillan spoke on the test for the reasonable man, saying, "The standard of foresight of the reasonable man is, in one sense, an impersonal test. It eliminates the personal equation and is independent of the idiosyncrasies of the particular person whose conduct is in question. Some persons are by nature unduly timorous and imagine every path beset with lions. Others, of more robust temperament, fail to foresee or nonchalantly disregard even the most obvious dangers. The reasonable man is presumed to be free both from over-apprehension and from over-confidence, but there is a sense in which the standard of care of the reasonable man involves in its application a subjective element. "

Hedley Byrne & Co Ltd v Heller & Partners Ltd [1964] AC 465 is an English tort law case on economic loss in English tort law resulting from a negligent misstatement. Prior to the decision, the notion that a party may owe another a duty of care for statements made in reliance had been rejected, with the only remedy for such losses being in contract law. The House of Lords overruled the previous position, in recognising liability for pure economic loss not arising from a contractual relationship, applying to commercial negligence the principle of "assumption of responsibility".

Hedley Byrne were a firm of advertising agents. A customer, Easipower Ltd, put in a large order. Hedley Byrne wanted to check their financial position, and creditworthiness, and so asked their bank,[a] to acquire a report from Easipower's bank, Heller & Partners Ltd., who replied in a letter that was headed,
"without responsibility on the part of this bank"
...Easipower is:
"considered good for its ordinary business engagements".
The letter was sent for free. Easipower soon went into liquidation, and Hedley Byrne lost £17,000 (equivalent to 470,000 in 2023) on contracts. Hedley Byrne sued Heller & Partners for negligence, claiming that the information was given negligently and was misleading.

Heller & Partners argued:
Lack of a direct nexus, also known as proximity in negligence law (nor an assumption of responsibility of a type established in law) of duty of care. If so, this would mean none was owed regarding the statements.
Liability was excluded; the header disclaimer used would make it unreasonable to rely on the bank reference/solvency statement, even if the law recognised some degree of duty of care owed.

The court found:
the relationship between the parties was "sufficiently proximate" as to create a duty of care. It was reasonable for them to have known that the information that they had given would likely have been relied upon for entering into a contract of some sort. That would give rise, the court said, to a "special relationship", in which the defendant would have to take sufficient care in giving advice to avoid negligence liability. The relationship was that the plaintiff trusted the defendant with the information and therefore the defendant ought to have been honest however, on the facts, the disclaimer was sufficient to discharge any duty created by Heller's actions. There were no orders for damages, because, A man cannot be said voluntarily to be undertaking a responsibility if at the very moment when he is said to be accepting it he declares that in fact he is not.

Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest wrote:
I consider that it follows and that it should now be regarded as settled that if someone possessing special skill undertakes, quite irrespective of contract, to apply that skill for the assistance of another person who relies upon such skill, a duty of care will arise. The fact that the service is to be given by means of or by the instrumentality of words can make no difference.

Furthermore, if in a sphere in which a person is so placed that others could reasonably rely upon his judgment or his skill or upon his ability to make careful inquiry, a person takes it upon himself to give information or advice to, or allows his information or advice to be passed on to, another person who, as he knows or should know, will place reliance upon it, then a duty of care will arise. ...in my judgment, the bank in the present case, by the words which they employed, effectively disclaimed any assumption of a duty of care. They stated that they only responded to the inquiry on the basis that their reply was without responsibility. If the inquirers chose to receive and act upon the reply they cannot disregard the definite terms upon which it was given. They cannot accept a reply given with a stipulation and then reject the stipulation.

Furthermore, within accepted principles... the words employed were apt to exclude any liability for negligence.
Home Office v Dorset Yacht Co Ltd [1970] UKHL 2, [1970] AC 1004It is a House of Lords decision on negligence and marked the start of a rapid expansion in the scope of negligence in the United Kingdom by widening the circumstances in which a court was likely to find a duty of care. The case also addressed the liability of government bodies, a person's liability for the acts of third parties that he has facilitated, and liability for omissions.

On 21 September 1962, ten borstal trainees were working on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour under the control of three officers employed by the Home Office. Seven trainees escaped one night; at the time the officers had retired to bed leaving the trainees to their own devices. The seven trainees who escaped boarded a yacht and collided with another yacht, the property of the respondents, and damaged it. The owners of the yacht sued the Home Office in negligence for damages.

A preliminary issue was ordered to be tried on whether the officers or the Home Office owed a duty of care to the claimants (plaintiffs, before the Civil Procedure Rules of 1999) capable of giving rise to liability in damages. It was admitted that the Home Office would be vicariously liable if an action would lie against any of the officers. The preliminary hearing found for the Dorset Yacht Co. that there was, in law, a duty of care and that the case could go forward for trial on its facts. The Home Office appealed to the House of Lords. The Home Office argued that it could owe no duty of care as there was no precedent for any duty on similar facts. Further, it was argued that there could be no liability for the actions of a third party and that the Home Office should be immune from legal action owing to the public nature of its duties.

Lord Denning MR held that the Home Office should be liable for the damage on grounds of public policy.

He stated:
What then is the right policy for the judges to adopt? On whom should the risk of negligence fall? Up till now it has fallen on the innocent victim. Many, many a time has a prisoner escaped - or been let out on parole - and done damage. But there is never a case in our law books when the prison authorities have been liable for it. No householder who has been burgled, no person who has been wounded by a criminal, has ever recovered damages from the prison authorities; such as to find a place in the reports.

The householder has claimed on his insurance company. The injured man can now claim on the compensation fund. None has claimed against the prison authorities. Should we alter all this: I should be reluctant to do so if, by so doing, we should hamper all the good work being done by our prison authorities... I can see the force of this argument. But I do not think it should prevail. I think that the officers of Borstal institutions should be liable for negligence.

The highest court held 4–1 likewise. Lord Reid held,
...the well-known passage in Lord Atkin's speech should I think be regarded as a statement of principle. It is not to be treated as if it were a statutory definition. It will require qualification in new circumstances. But I think that the time has come when we can and should say that it ought to apply unless there is some justification or valid explanation for its exclusion.
The case is perhaps relevant not only for its clear elucidation of the 1930 established Atkinian notion of neighbourhood (a proximity or sufficient nexus) but also for its expression of a thoroughly incrementalist approach to the development of the duty of care.

Anns v Merton London Borough Council [1977] UKHL 4, [1978] AC 728 was a decision of the House of Lords that established a broad test for determining the existence of a duty of care in the tort of negligence, called the Anns test or sometimes the two-stage test for true third-party negligence. The case was overruled by Murphy v Brentwood DC [1991].

In 1962, the local authority of Merton approved building plans for the erection of a block of maisonettes. The approved plans showed the base wall and concrete foundations of the block to be 'three feet or deeper to the approval of local authority'. The notice of approval said that the bylaws of the council required that notice should be given to the council both at the commencement of the work and when the foundations were ready to be covered by the rest of the building work. The council had the powers to inspect the foundations and to require any corrections necessary to bring the work into conformity with the bylaws but was not under an obligation to do so.

The block of maisonettes was finished in 1962. The builder, which was also the owner, granted 999-year leases for the maisonettes, and the last conveyance took place in 1965. In 1970, structural movements occurred resulting in failure of the building comprising cracks in the wall, sloping of the floors and other defects. In 1972, the plaintiffs, who were lessees of the maisonettes, issued writs against the builder and the council.

The plaintiffs claimed that the damage was a consequence of the block having been built on inadequate foundations since there was a depth of only two feet and six inches, instead of the three feet or deeper shown on the plans and required under the bylaws. The plaintiffs claimed damages in negligence against the council for approving the foundations and/or failing to inspect the foundations.

At the hearing at first instance, the plaintiffs' case failed on the basis that it was statute barred as the cause of action arose on the first sale of a maisonette by the owner, more than six years before an action was commenced. The Court of Appeal allowed the appeals on the basis that the cause of action arose when the damage was discovered or ought to have been discovered.

The court found in favour of the tenants.

• The appeal was raised on two points:
  • Whether the local council were under any duty of care toward owners or occupiers of houses as regards inspection during the building process.
  • What period of limitation applied to claims by such owners or occupiers against the local council.
• The House of Lords unanimously decided that a duty of care existed and that such a duty was not barred by a "limitation of actions" statute.
• The Anns Test was established by Lord Wilberforce as a two-stage test. It required a sufficient relationship of proximity based upon foreseeability and then considerations of reasons that there should not be a duty of care.
• Lord Wilberforce had to consider a decision of the House of Lords in East Suffolk River Catchment Board v. Kent in which it was argued a Statutory Authority failed in reasonable time to repair the breach of a drainage bank and damage was sustained by the plaintiff's land as a result. Lord Wilberforce stated that case was decided on the basis of a different statute, subject to a different range of considerations, but that it might be said that there was no real consideration of a general duty of care and that the content of any duty of care against the background of considerable flooding and other activity being undertaken by the defendant argued for a lower standard of care, if not the absence of a duty of care.
• The nature of the duty of care had to be closely related to the consideration of the statutory powers granted to the council and the exercise of due care in those powers.
• Lord Wilberforce dismissed the limitation of actions issues quite quickly and held that the claim was not statute-barred.
• Murphy v Brentwood District Council [1991] UKHL 2, [1991] 1 AC 398 was a judicial decision of the House of Lords in relation to recovery for pure economic loss in tort.
• The court overruled the decision in Anns v Merton London Borough Council with respect to a duty of care in English law.
• A builder failed to build proper foundations to a house. The defendant local authority, approving the building for its building regulations, failed to recognise the problem. When the building became dangerously unstable, the claimant was unable to raise any money for repairs, chose not to sue anyone at that stage, and therefore had to sell the house at a considerable loss. He sought to recover his loss from Brentwood District Council, but the action failed as the loss, the deflated value he obtained for the house, was classed as a pure economic loss.

The House of Lords overruled Anns and held that the council was not liable in the absence of physical injury. Just as in the Anns case, building regulations are part of the bylaws of the local council and require that notice should be given to the council both at the commencement of the work and at specific stages, such as when the foundation trenches were ready to be poured. Councils have the powers to inspect the foundations and to require any corrections necessary to bring the work into conformity with the bylaws, but they are not under an obligation to do so.

In Anns, the House of Lords considered whether the local council were under any duty of care toward owners or occupiers of houses as regards inspection during the building process and unanimously decided that a duty of care existed.

Anns has been overruled, with the conclusion that a person who has a right has no duties implicitly attached to that right. The jurists Mickey Dias and Hohfeld have shown that rights and duties are jural correlatives. That is to say that if someone has a right, someone else owes a duty. The inspectors have a right to inspect, and the builder has a duty to let them inspect.

Caparo Industries PLC v Dickman [1990] UKHL 2 is a leading English tort law case on the test for a duty of care.

The House of Lords, following the Court of Appeal, set out a "three-fold test".

In order for a duty of care to arise in negligence:
harm must be reasonably foreseeable as a potential result of the defendant's conduct (as established in Donoghue v Stevenson), the parties must be in a relationship of proximity, and it must be fair, just and reasonable to impose liability.

The final conclusion arose in the context of a negligent preparation of accounts for a company. Previous cases on negligent misstatements had fallen under the principle of Hedley Byrne v Heller. This stated that when a person makes a statement, he voluntarily assumes responsibility to the person he makes it to (or those who were in his contemplation). If the statement was made negligently, then he will be liable for any loss which results. The question in Caparo was the scope of the assumption of responsibility, and what the limits of liability ought to be.

On a preliminary issue as to whether a duty of care existed in the circumstances as alleged by the plaintiff, the plaintiff was unsuccessful at first instance but was successful in the Court of Appeal in establishing a duty of care might exist in the circumstances.

Lord Justice Bingham held that as a small shareholder, Caparo was entitled to rely on the accounts. Had Caparo been a simple outside investor, with no stake in the company, it would have had no claim. But because the auditors' work is primarily intended to be for the benefit of the shareholders, and Caparo did in fact have a small stake when it saw the company accounts, its claim was good. This was overturned by the House of Lords, which unanimously held there was no duty of care.

Caparo Industries plc v Dickman
A company called Fidelity plc, manufacturers of electrical equipment, was the target of a takeover by Caparo Industries plc. Fidelity was not doing well. In March 1984 Fidelity had issued a profit warning, which had halved its share price. In May 1984 Fidelity's directors made a preliminary announcement in its annual profits for the year up to March. This confirmed the position was bad.

The share price fell again. At this point Caparo had begun buying up shares in large numbers. In June 1984 the annual accounts, which were done with the help of the accountant Dickman, were issued to the shareholders, which now included Caparo. Caparo reached a shareholding of 29.9% of the company, at which point it made a general offer for the remaining shares, as the City Code's rules on takeovers required. But once it had control, Caparo found that Fidelity's accounts were in an even worse state than had been revealed by the directors or the auditors. It sued Dickman for negligence in preparing the accounts and sought to recover its losses. This was the difference in value between the company as it had and what it would have had if the accounts had been accurate.

The majority of the Court of Appeal held that a duty was owed by the auditor to shareholders individually, and although it was not necessary to decide that in this case and the judgment was obiter, that a duty would not be owed to an outside investor who had no shareholding. Bingham LJ held that, for a duty owed to shareholders directly, the very purpose of publishing accounts was to inform investors so that they could make choices within a company about how to use their shares. But for outside investors, a relationship of proximity would be "tenuous" at best, and that it would certainly not be "fair, just and reasonable".

The first is foreseeability. It is not, and could not be, in issue between these parties that reasonable foreseeability of harm is a necessary ingredient of a relationship in which a duty of care will arise:
Lord Bridge of Harwich who delivered the leading judgment restated the so-called "Caparo test" which Bingham LJ had formulated below. His decision was, following O'Connor LJ's dissent in the Court of Appeal, that no duty was owed at all, either to existing shareholders or to future investors by a negligent auditor. The purpose of the statutory requirement for an audit of public companies under the Companies Act 1985 was the making of a report to enable shareholders to exercise their class rights in general meeting. It did not extend to the provision of information to assist shareholders in the making of decisions as to future investment in the company. He said that the principles have developed since Anns v Merton London Borough Council. 

The three-stage test given in Caparo is used to deal with novel issues of duty of care. The first test—reasonable foreseeability—is judged objectively and seeks to exclude liability that a reasonable person could not foresee. It draws on previous case law including Donoghue and Hedley Byrne. The use of reasonable foreseeability as a criterion in the establishing a duty of care is a very general one and is a different type of inquiry than the level of foreseeability used in determining elsewhere in negligence—breach and remoteness, specifically.

While it has been described as "uncertain" and "slippery" by some later judges (and as being an unhelpful circular definition by critical scholars), the proximity criteria identified in Caparo has been interpreted to include proximity in terms of geography, time, the relationship between parties, and causal proximity. The level of proximity has been significant in cases involving failure by to control a third party (along with public policy factors) such as Dorset Yacht Co Ltd v Home Office, as well as in cases of pure psychiatric injury to secondary victims (such as the Hillsborough cases including Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police.

The third part of the test in Caparo—whether the extension of liability is "fair, just and reasonable" (commonly known as policy considerations)—has been of relevance in a variety of contexts including controversial "wrongful conception" claims, and cases regarding the extent of liability that should be imposed on emergency services. Policy factors are inherently fact specific, but they have included concerns about "opening the floodgates", as well as the desire to avoid medical professionals and emergency services becoming overly cautious and defensive in their practices.

 and she claimed that the police owed her a duty of care not to be put in danger. The UK Supreme Court found that the police did owe a duty of care in this case as there was no general rule that the police are not under any duty of care when performing their duties.

In reaching its decision, the Supreme Court reinterpreted and narrowed the leading case Caparo Industries plc v Dickman and found that there was no single test for determining the duty of care, instead urging for an approach based on common law, precedent, and the incremental development of the law. In novel cases, where established principles or previous cases did not already establish whether there would be a duty of care, the court would be entitled to go beyond these principles to decide whether to find one. The Supreme Court also reinterpreted Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire to reject the proposition that the police would never owe a duty of care; rather, liability for negligence would arise where such liability would be present under ordinary tort principles. Robinson is considered one of the most important cases in 2018, as it clarifies the liability of the police to members of the public and the general test towards finding a duty of care in general, in a significant shift from Caparo, which held that there was a three-part.

In July 2008, the appellant, a 76-year-old woman, was knocked over on a street in Huddersfield by a group of men. Two of the men, the defendants, were police officers and a third was a suspected drug dealer, whom they were attempting to arrest. As the officers struggled with the dealer, he backed into the appellant, who fell over and was injured. The officers had foreseen that the drug dealer would attempt to escape and did not notice that the appellant was in the immediate vicinity.
 
The appellant claimed that the officers had owed her a duty of care and had breached that duty. The recorder in the first instance had found that the officers had been negligent, but that the police were immune from claims against them in negligence; the recorder relied on Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire [1987] UKHL 12. The Court of Appeal reversed the liability decision and held that the police owed no duty of care. It applied the Caparo test and indicated that most negligence claims and omissions by the police in the course of investigating and preventing crime would fail the third stage of the test: whether it was fair, just and reasonable to impose a duty. It also found that as the suspect, not the officers, was responsible for the harm, the case concerned an omission rather than a positive act. The appellant appealed to the Supreme Court. 
The appeal was allowed, with Lord Reed giving the majority judgment, with which Lady Hale and Lord Hodge agreed. Lord Mance and Lord Hughes, while agreeing that there was a duty of care, dissented on the reasons why one existed.

After reviewing the facts, Lord Reed held that Caparo Industries v Dickman repudiated the idea that there was a single test for determining the existence of a duty of care and urged an approach based on common law, precedent, and the incremental development of the law by analogy with established authorities. Only in novel cases, where established principles did not provide an answer, would courts need to go beyond established principles to decide whether to recognize a duty of care. In the instant case, the existence of a duty depended on the application of established principles of negligence.

Lord Reed then went on to determine whether there was a general rule that the police were under no duty of care when performing operational duties. In applying Michael v Chief Constable of South Wales Police [2015] UKSC 2 and re-examining Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire [1987] UKHL 12, he held that the latter case was misunderstood. The general law of tort applied to the police, who are subject to liability for causing personal injury; Hill expressly confirmed the police's liability for negligence where such liability would arise under ordinary tortious principles. However, the general duty of the police to enforce the criminal law does not carry with it a private law duty towards individual members of the public. The common law does not normally impose liability for omissions, or for a failure to prevent harm caused by the conduct of third parties.

Darnley v Croydon Health Services NHS Trust
 The claimant attended A&E after suffering a blow to the head. He had severe headaches which were getting worse. The receptionist informed him that there was a waiting time of four to five hours. In reality, the hospital's policy was that he would be seen in half an hour, at which point a triage nurse could better advise him (depending on his symptoms). After 19 minutes, the claimant left as he felt too ill to stay. He did not inform staff that he was leaving. The claimant later collapsed and suffered brain damage. He sued the hospital for negligence.

The Supreme Court held in favour of the claimant.
This case was not a novel situation. It was sufficiently analogous to the many cases stating that A&E medical staff owe a duty of care to patients. The defendant's duty was to take reasonable steps not to cause foreseeable injury to patients: these facts fell within that duty. The fact that the duty was delegated to non-medical staff instead of medical staff was irrelevant.

The receptionist had not acted as a reasonable A&E receptionist ought to have done, as she did not follow the known and established policy.

Since the claimant would have remained in the hospital if he had known the truth and it was reasonably foreseeable that he might leave if provided incorrect information, causation was unbroken.
The defendant was therefore liable in negligence.