Amendment to claim user damages permitted in Gormsen v Meta collective action.

13/10/25

The Competition Appeal Tribunal has granted Dr Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, the class representative in proceedings against Meta, permission to amend her representative claim for alleged abuse of a dominant position in respect of its data practices. In the claim as certified (see article here), Dr Gormsen seeks damages on behalf of UK Facebook users for Facebook’s collection and use of Off-Facebook Data, which she contends involved the imposition of an unfair term and/or unfair price.

Prior to this amendment, the class representative sought damages only on the basis of what she contends Facebook would in fact have paid users to acquire their data in a non-abusive counterfactual. In permitting the amendment, the Tribunal will now allow Dr Gormsen to argue at trial that the class should alternatively be awarded user damages for its loss.

User damages have long been of interest in the field of commercial remedies, and were considered in detail by the Supreme Court in Morris-Garner v One Step [2018] UKSC 20, where Lord Reed giving the majority judgment clarified that they are compensatory rather than restitutionary in nature.

In opposing the amendment application, Meta contended that user damages are not recoverable for breaches of competition law (§8), relying inter alia on Stoke-on-Trent v W&J Wass Limited [1988] 1 WLR 1406 (“Wass”) and Devenish Nutrition v Sanofie-Aventis [2008] EWCA 1086 (“Devenish”) (§20). The Tribunal concluded that it was not possible to extract from the case law “a principle that user damages are unarguably not available for the statutory tort of breach of the Chapter II Prohibition” (§43). It also held that this is “a developing area of law and therefore not one which is amenable to summary determination” (§45).

Meta’s second basis for resisting the amendment will also be of interest to competition practitioners in collective actions. Meta contended that the amendment sought did not satisfy the requirements of certification (§48). The Tribunal held that the claim had already been certified, and that while certification “is an active process”, it saw no reason why “certification should not embrace the claim to user damages” (§53).

The judgment is available here.