The Legal Position on Stress in the Workplace

The legal position relating to an employer's duty and responsibility for stress in the workplace is clear and straightforward.

It is an employer's duty in law to make sure that employees (and others) are not made ill by their work. The duty is imposed or implied in both civil and criminal law. In the former the employer has a duty of care to protect employees from risks of foreseeable injury, disease or death at work. This principle was identified in Wilson's & Clyde Coal Co. Ltd v English (1938) House of Lords.

A duty of care is imposed by the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 and 2001. This means that an employer has an equal duty of care for the mental health and well being of staff as they have for their physical health and safety.

But the threat of prosecution itself is only the tip of the iceberg. Costs and time associated with defending a case, damage to the organisation's reputation, etc. produces a cost ratio of around 1:3. That is, the cost of the compensation is around one third of the real cost to the business.

This of course doesn't take into account the human cost - employee morale, motivation, recruitment and retention, etc.

The HSE has served improvement notices on:

	Coventry City Council
	Coventry Airport Handling Ltd
	West Dorset General Hospitals NHS Trust - not because people were suffering from stress but because they did not have a stress at work policy and had not conducted a stress audit!