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Implied duties relating to health and safety

Employers have an implied duty to take reasonable steps to ensure an employee’s health and safety and to provide a safe working environment. This includes a duty to take reasonable steps to protect mental health, which covers issues such as preventing work-related stress, bullying and overwork. The employer’s implied duty not to cause reasonably foreseeable psychiatric harm was established in Walker v Northumberland CC [1995] IRLR 35.

In NWT Freight Forwarding v Owen EAT/0643/01, a requirement for a driver to work without a reasonable break was found to be a breach of this implied contract term.

In Gogay v Hertfordshire County Council [2000] IRLR 703, an employer was liable for the personal (psychiatric) injury caused to a care worker by an unjustified suspension from work in breach of the implied contractual duty of mutual trust and confidence.

More cases on the employer’s duty to take reasonable steps to safeguard health, including mental health, can be found in LRD’s Chapter05>: Stress and Mental Health at Work (www.lrdpublications.org.uk/publications.php?pub=BK&iss=1562, 2011 and the annual publication, Law at Work (www.lrdpublications.org.uk/publications.php?pub=BK&iss=1664).