Seeking redress for work-related stress



In practice, “stress” cases are exceptionally difficult and expensive to pursue, although a series of high profile civil cases have helped to focus employer attention on the issue. These cases share some important features. In particular, successful claims require persuasive expert medical evidence that:


• the worker has suffered psychiatric injury. Stress on its own is not enough;



• the psychiatric injury was caused by work-related factors such as bullying, poor and unsupportive line management, excessive workload, long hours, poor work systems and processes and so on;



• psychiatric injury to this particular employee was reasonably foreseeable, for example, because the employer has been warned of the risk of psychiatric injury, either directly by the employee or a GP or rep, or because the employee has a past history of mental health problems known to the employer; and



• there was something the employer, acting reasonably, could have done to avoid the injury.



Typically, successful cases have involved already vulnerable employees who return to work after an absence linked to mental health problems at work, such as stress or depression, and are not given the ongoing support and care needed to reintegrate effectively back into the workplace, leading to a further breakdown of mental health. It is the employer’s knowledge of an employee’s pre-existing vulnerability to mental illness that makes the later breakdown reasonably foreseeable, fixing the employer with liability for the employee’s injury and loss.



In a recent case highlighted by the university and college lecturers’ union, UCU, its member Kate Rawnsley won £159,000 in damages in a personal injury stress case against Bradford College. A county court judge found the art and design lecturer suffered depression and anxiety as a result of her employer’s negligence. In this case, she had sent emails notifying the dean of the college that proposals to relocate her course to a room she did not think suitable for art students were affecting her health. The judge found these represented actual notification to the college that she was suffering, or likely to suffer, from stress-related ill health. In failing to take action, the dean had not followed the college’s stress policy nor had he acted as a prudent employer, the judge said.


The key cases that address an employer’s liability for personal injury caused by stress are Sutherland v Hatton [2002] IRLR 263 CA and Barber v Somerset County Council [2004] IRLR 475 HL. These cases confirm that an employer’s liability for psychiatric harm is no different from its liability for physical harm. In both cases, the test is what was reasonably foreseeable to the employer in the particular circumstances of the case. There are no “inherently stressful” occupations.



On the whole, the reported cases in this area tend to appear very “pro-employer”. In Yapp v the Foreign and Commonwealth Office [2014] EWCA Civ 1512, the Court of Appeal ruled that an employer is entitled to assume that someone who is apparently healthy, with no history of psychiatric ill health, can endure “even a very serious setback at work” (in this case, an unjustified suspension) without developing a depressive illness. In Easton v B&Q [2015] EWHC 880, a High Court judge confirmed that even the fact that an employer knows their employee is taking medication, such as anti-depressants, is not enough on its own to alert them to a need to take special care of their mental well-being and so avoid a claim for negligence if their condition is made worse by their work.



In Sutherland v Hatton, the Court of Appeal issued some useful guidance in the form of 16 “practical propositions”. The complete judgment, including the guidance, can be found at: www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2002/76.html.