If ever there was a word that came to the fore during the course of the 1990s and 2000s, it has to be “stress”. As a consequence of case law development in the course of the last 3-4 years, the bar to bringing a successful stress at work claim has been significantly raised.
Before I consider the present position in the law, a brief history lesson is necessary. Stress cases really took off, from a Plaintiff’s perspective from in and around 1994. In that year Mr Walker, a local authority employee, proceeded against his employer Northumberland County Council. Mr Walker was a Senior Social Worker. He had been working for some years when he suffered his first breakdown in November 1986. He had also been an Area Manager. He returned to work in 1987 and by September of that year a second breakdown had occurred and he was subsequently dismissed from his employment on grounds of permanent ill health in May of the following year. According to the medical evidence put forward by Mr Walker, the breakdowns were linked to an increase in the number of child abuse cases in an area of very high childcare problems. In fact such problems increased due to the substantial growth of the population in the area from 65,000 in 1974, when Mr Walker first went to the area to some 80,000 people by the time of his first breakdown.
Mr Walker’s symptoms were mental exhaustion, acute anxiety, sleeplessness and bouts of weeping. His legal representatives contended that the nervous breakdowns were caused by the employers negligence in exposing him to unreasonable and avoidable stress due to an impossible workload. The High Court agreed and, on 16th November 1994, ruled that Northumberland County Council was indeed in breach of its common law duty of care towards Mr Walker.
The Council did not accept this proposition and appealed to the Court of Appeal. However before the Court of Appeal decision was made, Mr Walker accepted £175,000 offered as an out of court settlement by the Council. The Council stated that the out of court settlement was based on commercial reasons and that the amount was a significant reduction in the potential value of the claim.
This decision had a significant impact upon lawyers advising potential Plaintiffs complaining of stress at work. It opened a means to seek redress in relation to employees who had been forced to retire from work as a consequence of ill health engendered by the conditions of the employment. It is however important to note that liability was found against the employer on a limited basis. The court held that Northumberland Borough Council was only in breach of the common law duty to provide a safe place of work in so far as it failed to protect Mr Walker from harm that was reasonably foreseeable. The court found that the first breakdown was not caused by any breach of the Defendant’s duty of care as it was not, at that stage, reasonably foreseeable that Mr Walker’s workload would give rise to a material risk of mental illness. Mr Walker had made no previous complaint, prior to his first absence, about ill health. However the court found that the second breakdown was due to the employer’s breach of the duty of care. After the first breakdown the employer had been fixed with knowledge that the circumstances of Mr Walker’s employment were causing him to be ill. Prior to his return to work the council agreed that it would put in place a number of changes in order to make Mr Walker’s life easier when he returned. That included a reduction in the workload and a change in reporting requirements. These proposed changes did not in fact materialise, Mr Walker was forced to shoulder the burden of the work which had previously caused him ill health and unsurprisingly he suffered a second breakdown. That, in the opinion of the court, was foreseeable.
The Plaintiff’s lawyers seized upon this decision and began to litigate many cases on behalf of individuals who alleged that they had been caused to experience stress at work. The “high water mark” was probably reached towards the end of the 1990s when cases were being settled by employers in respect of “first breakdowns”. A case in point, Kirk –v- Nacano, was settled in the Manchester District Registry on 26th October 1998.
In that case the Defendant company’s business was the manufacturer of beverage cans. The Plaintiff began working at their factory in 1980. The company was taken over by an American multinational in 1988. This led to tougher working conditions. A new plant manager was installed who adopted a “tougher, more aggressive, even sometimes foul mouthed” style of management. He was known as “Darth Vader”. He set tough performance targets and often became angry or aggressive. In 1992 the Plaintiff was seconded to France but returned a year later to the original factory. The original plant manager was side lined and left in March 1993. He was replaced by a number of American “trouble-shooters”. According to the Plaintiff, the Americans adopted a practice of verbally abusing and humiliating shift managers including the Plaintiff. On one memorable occasion the Plaintiff was verbally abused, via a tannoy, by one of the Americans who was drunk at the time.
Ultimately this particular Plaintiff went absent from his work on ill health. He did not return. His case settled for in the region of £200,000.
Like all good things, these cases had to come to an end. By allowing cases of this nature to succeed the court had, inadvertently, opened a “Pandora’s box.” In the decade pursuant to the decision in the Walker case, the courts witnessed a tenfold increase in the number of claims being pursued in respect of work related stress. The Court of Appeal eventually put its foot down in February 2002.