News.

In Greening-Steer v Ainge [2026] EWHC 1239 (KB), Mr Justice Ritchie heard the claim of a motorcyclist who suffered a traumatic brain injury and an incomplete spinal cord injury in a 2019 road traffic accident. Liability was admitted. The claimant said he had serious lasting cognitive and physical disabilities. The defendant’s insurer amended its defence to allege fundamental dishonesty. It relied on surveillance footage and on the claimant’s failure of the symptom validity tests used by the neuropsychology experts. The judge found that the claimant had been fundamentally dishonest and dismissed the claim, valued at just under £5 million, in its entirety. He recorded honest damages of £378,420, which the claimant lost.

The neuropsychological evidence was central to the outcome. The claimant’s own neuropsychologist, Dr Richard Maddicks, found that he had not engaged properly with the performance validity tests (PVTs) or symptom validity tests (SVTs). As a result, Dr Maddicks could not give an opinion on whether the claimant was cognitively able to work. The defendant’s neuropsychologist, Professor Kemp, recorded that the claimant failed the PVTs and SVTs. He concluded that the claimant had at most a mild neurocognitive deficit, with no significant lasting effects. In their joint statement, both experts agreed that the failed validity testing invalidated the standard cognitive tests, so it was likely he was over-reporting his difficulties. Both agreed that whether he was malingering was ultimately for the court to decide. The judge held that, having refused to engage with the PVTs and SVTs, the claimant had not proved any significant cognitive decline.

For practitioners, the case shows the value of validity testing that recent Psychology & Psychiatry Experts articles have highlighted. Standalone PVTs such as the TOMM, MSVT and CARB, and SVTs such as the SIMS, SIRS-2 and M-FAST, do not make the expert a lie detector. They tell the court whether the rest of the test results can be relied on. Here, both experts correctly left the finding of dishonesty to the judge. The judge combined the failed validity results with surveillance footage, medical records and inconsistencies in the claimant’s accounts over time. That combination is the same triangulation of self-report, collateral records and psychometric results described in our article on response tendencies. The judgment also criticised a claimant-side expert for holding back his true views on malingering until cross-examination. Experts should set out validity concerns clearly and early in their reports.