Six Supreme Court judgments were handed down on 27 July 2026, the last sitting day of the Trinity term, and the court now rises until Michaelmas on 1 October. Five of them have not been covered here. They arrived alongside three appellate and first-instance decisions on conditional pension increases, partnership profits and the reach of an account of profits.
What did the Supreme Court decide before the vacation?
Six judgments cleared in a single sitting day, and this is the last substantial batch of appellate authority until the autumn. Drelle v Servis-Terminal LLC [2026] UKSC 29 we have covered separately, on whether an unrecognised foreign judgment can found a bankruptcy petition. The other five are below.
The Kingdom of Bahrain v Shehabi and another [2026] UKSC 25 is the one with the widest reach. The court split three to two, with Lord Lloyd-Jones, Lord Hamblen and Lady Simler in the majority and Lord Leggatt dissenting. The personal injury exception in section 5 of the State Immunity Act 1978 applies, they held, where a foreign state’s agents remotely install spyware on a computer physically in the United Kingdom and thereby cause psychiatric harm. Bahrain’s appeal from [2024] EWCA Civ 1158 was dismissed. Once a device here is compromised, on the majority’s reasoning, it does not matter where the person responsible was sitting.
Tesla, Inc and another v InterDigital Patent Holdings, Inc and others [2026] UKSC 27 reversed the majority of the Court of Appeal. The English courts have jurisdiction, it holds, to consider claims for declaratory relief as to the FRAND terms of a licence to a pool of standard essential patents owned by multiple entities and managed by a single administrator. Service was dealt with too: implementer-commenced claims may be served on UK patent holders under CPR 63.14 where the patent has a registered address for service here, and out of the jurisdiction under Gateway 11 where it does not.
The remaining three are AXA Insurance UK Plc and another v Commissioners of Inland Revenue and another [2026] UKSC 24, Akbars Restaurant (Middlesbrough) Ltd v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] UKSC 26, and R v Sheikh and others (UKSC/2025/0094). Bahrain and Tesla each carry enough to justify a standalone piece, and the court’s judgments page holds all six.
Northumbrian Water: what the trustee has to take into account
Richard Smith J handed down judgment on 3 August 2026 in Northumbrian Water Ltd v Northumbrian Water Pension Trustees Ltd & Anor [2026] EWHC 1952 (Ch), construing rules whose roots run back to the scheme established at privatisation in 1988.
The rules guarantee annual increases of RPI up to 5 per cent, with any excess payable where the trustee is satisfied, after consulting the scheme actuary, that it can be paid without increasing the employer’s ordinary annual contributions. RPI exceeded 5 per cent in each of 2021, 2022 and 2023, the first sustained test the provision had faced in decades, and the scheme sat at 81.5 per cent on a technical provisions basis at the December 2022 valuation. The disputed increases affected around 2,000 members and were valued at roughly £26 million.
The court held that the trustee’s assessment must extend to any future increase in employer contributions, including one arising at the next scheduled valuation. The trustee may also weigh all reasonably foreseeable events, and the effect of the proposed increase on the security of existing benefits. A full RPI increase should not be awarded where there is material uncertainty about whether additional employer contributions would be required. The judgment also holds that following the 2010 removal of the scheme’s segregated sub-fund structure, members of the section in question could not be treated as exclusively entitled to surplus, so genuine competing claims from other sections have to be taken into account. Legacy schemes carrying similarly worded discretionary increase provisions are the wider audience here.
Court of Appeal returns to the Partnership Act 1890
In Titanium Capital Investment Ltd & Anor v Hughes & Ors [2026] EWCA Civ 976, handed down on 28 July 2026, the Court of Appeal substantially allowed the appeal in a partnership dispute that has already produced a three-week trial.
The underlying business was founded in the early months of the pandemic to sell lateral flow Covid tests. It lasted under seven months before one partner dissolved it and, days later, started an ostensibly new business in the same trade, which went on to win a contract supplying the Danish government. Richards J gave the first-instance judgment on liability in Titanium Capital Investments Ltd v Hughes [2025] EWHC 682 (Ch) on 20 March 2025, with quantum to be tried separately.
The appeal engages sections 29, 38 and 42 of the Partnership Act 1890, covering accountability for private profits, the continuing authority of partners after dissolution, and the right of an outgoing partner to share in post-dissolution profits. Those sections are pleaded infrequently and appellate guidance on them is scarce, which is what makes a 136-year-old statute worth a note in August.
Can interest be awarded on an account of profits?
The main appeal in Lufthansa Technik AG v Astronics Advanced Electronic Systems & Anor [2026] EWCA Civ 964, decided on 27 July 2026, was about apportionment rather than interest, and Lufthansa lost it. Arnold LJ, with Lewison and Nugee LJJ agreeing, dismissed the appeal against Leech J’s finding that the defendants should account for only a fraction of the profits generated by their in-seat aircraft power systems. Those systems did infringe. The patent, which expired in 2018, covered a safety feature detecting whether a plug was properly inserted.
That is the point that travels furthest. An account of profits under section 61(1)(d) of the Patents Act 1977 does not hand the claimant everything the infringing product earned, and a claimant electing for profits over damages should model the apportionment before making the election rather than after.
A linked appeal, heard in the same four-day hearing, addressed the court’s jurisdiction to award interest on such profits, whether that jurisdiction reaches the period before the claimant elects, and the principled approach to setting the rate. The interest question is the one that reaches beyond patent work to any account of profits remedy.
Is the government reviewing IPP sentences?
It is being asked to consider one, which is not quite the same thing. Reporting on 4 August 2026 indicates that the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has asked the Justice Secretary, Alex Norris, to look at reviewing imprisonment for public protection sentences, as part of a set of prison announcements made the same day and alongside the pause of the early release scheme due in September. No departmental statement has been published, so this rests on press reporting rather than an official announcement.
The numbers are not in doubt. Around 2,400 people remain in prison under a sentence abolished for new prisoners in 2012, some of them sentenced as children. As at September 2025 there were 2,422 in custody, of whom 946 had never been released and 1,476 had been recalled after release, and Ministry of Justice projections suggest more than 520 will still be in custody in March 2030. The Commons Library briefing tracks the position.
What makes this worth logging is the pattern rather than the item. It follows the signalled rethink on jury trial restrictions and the pause on the Sentencing Act release changes, which makes three reversals or reviews of inherited sentencing policy inside a month.
The Supreme Court cleared six judgments on its last sitting day of the term and now rises until 1 October, so this is the last substantial batch of appellate authority until the autumn. Bahrain and Tesla are the two that will be cited most. On the pensions side, Northumbrian Water tells trustees that a conditional increase rule requires them to look forward to the next valuation, not only at the position in front of them.