The Press Complaints Commission has rejected a complaint of breach of privacy against The Herald, Plymouth, after it reported on the arrest of a local businessman during a police raid.

The individual concerned, Luke Dann, was named and photographed in the newspaper and the article, headlined “Car boss arrested in police raid,” was accompanied by a picture of his home.

The police had not publicly released his name in connection with the incident, and Mr Dann claimed that publication of this information, along with the name of the road on which he lived and details of his personalised car number plate, was an invasion of his private life.

However, the PCC did not agree that the newspaper had acted in breach of the Code of Practice.

While the Commission acknowledged that Mr Dann had not been charged following the raid, it was not in dispute that he had been arrested during high profile police activity.

In its ruling it said: “The Commission does not consider that an arrest is a private matter, and reporting on police action is, in any case, inherently in the public interest and part of an open society unless there are formal reporting restrictions in place.”

Details about the complainant, his house and his apparently privileged lifestyle did not concern anything “demonstrably private.”

“They amounted to the sort of incidental reporting that is quite normal and acceptable in the coverage of such incidents,” the Commission concluded.