Stress at work 1: statutory and common law duties of care

Once again, it is clear that this is intended to cover physical and mental diseases or conditions. The ACP indicates that appropriate health surveillance procedures can include medical examination, which may involve clinical examination and measurement of physiological or psychological effects by an appropriately qualified practitioner (para. 32(c)).

The working environment

As we noted above, stress-related illnesses or conditions can be connected with certain physical characteristics of the working environment. From 1 January 1996, all existing workplaces will be covered by the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992⁸. These cover a wide range of matters, including: effective and suitable provision for the ventilation of workplaces by a sufficient quantity of fresh or purified air (reg. 6); suitable and sufficient lighting (reg. 8); sufficient space in work rooms (reg. 10); the provision of sanitary conveniences and washing facilities (regs. 20 and 21); and suitable and sufficient rest facilities at readily accessible places (reg. 25). Once again, the Regulations are supplemented by an ACP.

The Regulations will replace provisions contained in older legislation, such as the Factories Act 1961 and the Office, Shops and Railway Premises Act 1963. They have in any case applied to new, modified, extended or converted workplaces (or parts of a workplace) since 1 January 1993.

Working time

There is at present no general legal regulation of working time in the UK. The question is thus essentially regulated by agreement between employer and employee under the contract of employment (to be discussed further in part two of this article). This position may well change in the light of the EC "Working Time" Directive, depending of course on the outcome of the United Kingdom Government's challenge to the Directive's validity (see box).

Meanwhile, there is only limited regulation in certain sectors of employment, including provisions regulating the driving time and daily work periods of heavy goods vehicle drivers (s.95 of the Transport Act 1968 and EEC Council Regulations 3820/85 and 3821/85). The High Court has recently held that, taken as a whole, those provisions are intended to protect the public from risks which arise in cases where the drivers of motor vehicles are suffering from fatigue: "That is met by securing the observance of proper hours or periods of work. [The provisions are] directed against driver fatigue however caused, and not specifically restricted to fatigue induced by driving" (Prime v Hosking).

Employees' duties

Employees are themselves under a general statutory duty to take reasonable care for their own (physical and mental) health and safety, and that of others who may be affected by their acts or omissions at work (s.7 of the HSW Act). More specifically, they now have a duty to inform their employer, or any other employee with specific health and safety duties, of any work situation which they consider reasonably represents a serious and immediate danger to health and safety; or of any matter which they reasonably consider represents a shortcoming in the employer's health and safety measures (reg. 12 of the Management Regulations).

In addition, employees are required to cooperate with their employer in so far as is necessary for it to perform or comply with its statutory duties (s.7 of the HSW Act). This obviously includes cooperation with risk assessments.

Enforcement of statutory duties

The HSW Act and related legislation and regulations are generally enforced through a system of "improvement" or "prohibition" notices issued by appropriate enforcing authorities, or by way of prosecution in the criminal courts. In either case, action is taken by the HSE (in respect of, amongst other things, industrial and factory premises and local authorities) or local authorities (in respect of commercial, office and shop premises).

Approved Codes of Practice (ACPs) and guidance issued by the HSC or HSE do not have the status of law. According to the HSC, "they describe good or best practice and are there to help all concerned to understand their legal duties." ⁹ However, if the provisions of an ACP are breached, a breach of the law will be taken to have been proved in any criminal proceedings unless the court is satisfied that legal requirements have been complied with otherwise than by observance of the Code.

There is no right of action in any civil proceedings in respect of a failure to comply with the general duties imposed on employers by ss. 2-7 of the HSW Act (s.47 of the Act), or the requirements of the Management Regulations (reg. 15). In other words, those provisions cannot in themselves form the basis of any individual civil claim for damages for negligence (see below) or breach of statutory duty. It is nevertheless likely that a failure to comply with the risk assessment requirements of the Management Regulations, for example, could be relied upon as prima facie evidence of a failure to carry out required practice (and consequently a failure to provide a safe system of work) in the context of a common law negligence action. The breach of other legislative provisions may, in appropriate circumstances, give rise to a direct civil claim for breach of statutory duty.

Common law duties of care

An employer is under a personal, non-delegable, civil legal duty to take reasonable care for the health and safety of its employees whilst they are at work. This effectively comprises a duty to take reasonable care to:

The employer's duty arises both in the tort of negligence, and under terms normally implied into an employee's contract of employment (although it is more usual for personal injury claims for damages by individual employees to be pursued in tort). It is owed to each employee as an individual, and all the circumstances relevant to that employee must be considered. The employer must therefore take into account any particular susceptibilities amongst its employees of which it is aware, or ought reasonably to be aware. An employer will breach its duty if it fails to take reasonable care to prevent reasonably foreseeable risks. It follows that an employer will be regarded as negligent if it does not take reasonable steps to eliminate a risk which it knows or ought to know is a real risk, and not merely a possibility which would not influence the mind of a reasonable employer in the circumstances.

Liability for psychiatric illness

It is now beyond doubt that the employer's common law duty of care covers both the physical and mental health and safety of its employees. Indeed, the House of Lords has recently stated that there is no general justification in negligence cases for regarding physical and psychiatric injury as different "kinds" of injury (Page v Smith). Once it is established that one party is under a duty of care to avoid causing personal injury to another, it does not in principle matter whether the injury in fact sustained by the victim is physical, psychological or both. The crucial test is consequently whether the defendant can reasonably foresee that his or her conduct will expose the victim to the risk of personal injury, whether physical or psychological. The law does not, however, compensate merely for normal human emotions such as distress, sadness, grief, or stress responses short of physical or mental illness. But provided the victim suffers a recognised psychiatric illness or condition, and it can be proved on the balance of probabilities that the illness was caused by the defendant's breach of duty, liability for damages will follow in the normal way.

For example, in Aston v Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd, an employee was exposed without protection to fumes from vinyl chloride monoma (VCM). He was subsequently informed that this is a carcinogen, which can cause angiosarcoma of the liver (ASL). He also learnt that that condition has a latent period of 15 to 18 years, and is likely to be fatal within six months of symptoms appearing. Some 10 years later he suffered a chronic reactive anxiety depression, which was allegedly brought about, at least in part, by the fear of contracting, and dying from, ASL. In the High Court, Mr Justice Rose had, somewhat unusually, to decide the questions of causation and damages on the assumption that ICI had been negligent or in breach of statutory duty in relation to the employee's original exposure to VCM fumes (there having been no admission of liability on that issue by the company, nor any previous finding of negligence by the Court).

Rose J found that the employee's work-induced fear and anxiety about ASL - exacerbated by seeing and hearing about the fate of colleagues who had contracted the condition - was a material cause of his psychiatric illness. Such illness did not, Rose J said, have to be occasioned by a "sudden appreciation by sight or sound of a horrifying event which violently agitates the mind". He consequently distinguished the present case from so-called "nervous shock" cases involving "secondary" victims, whose claims are based upon trauma suffered as a result of witnessing horrific events and/or the suffering of others (see further p.10 below). In the case of a primary relationship between an employer and employee in which the employee has sustained mental trauma in the course of his employment, he said, the elements of duty of care, proximity, foreseeability, and causation, if established, arise from and occur within that primary relationship. It thus seemed to Rose J that an employer whose system of work negligently induces psychiatric injury by, for example, "excessive noise or flickering lights or psychological pressures is just as liable as one who causes physical injury ..."

The psychiatric illness of the employee in the present case was not, he said, a consequence of what he had seen or heard of the fate of others. His claim was based on what he suffered through fear for himself, albeit that the seriousness of the threat to himself was emphasised by what he knew had happened to others. Psychiatric illness of the kind suffered by the employee here was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of his earlier exposure to carcinogenic fumes. It did not matter that the extent of the illness suffered was greater than that suffered by his work colleagues, or that he may have been more susceptible than some to psychiatric conditions.

The employee was awarded some £10,000 in damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity. Rose J admitted, however, that this may have been an "academic" exercise, since ICI could in theory have refused to pay the compensation and gone back to court to litigate the question of liability.

What is reasonably foreseeable?

As we have already observed, the central issue in the majority of cases is whether an employer has taken reasonable care to prevent a reasonably foreseeable risk of stress or anxiety-induced personal injury (whether physical or psychiatric). It will be negligent only if it fails to take reasonable steps to eliminate a risk which it knows or ought to know is a real risk, and not a trivial or negligible risk which would not influence the mind of a reasonable employer in the circumstances.

In Petch v Commissioners of Customs and Excise, for example, Mr Petch joined the Civil Service in 1961. He was regarded by his superiors as a "high-flyer", and by 1973 he had received accelerated promotion to the rank of assistant secretary and was put in charge of the management services division of the Customs and Excise. In October 1974, however, he suffered a mental breakdown which took the form of a bout of severe depression. He returned to work in January 1975, but developed hypomania, a state of euphoria or ebullience, which is the opposite side of the coin to depression for those suffering from "manic depressive psychosis". He was ultimately transferred from Customs and Excise to the Department of Health and Social Security in June 1975. Mr Petch claimed that the Customs and Excise had been negligent in its treatment of him both before and after his mental breakdown The employer conceded that it owed Mr Petch "a duty to take reasonable care to ensure that the duties allocated to him should not damage his health". It also accepted that this included both the employee's physical and mental health, subject to the caveat that issues of foreseeability and causation were likely to be more difficult in mental injury cases.

In relation to the original breakdown, the Court of Appeal said that the employer would not be negligent in failing to take steps to avert that event unless senior management were aware or ought to have been aware that Mr Petch was showing signs of impending breakdown, or were aware or ought to have been aware that his workload carried a real risk that he would have a breakdown. The Court said that it was clear on the medical evidence that Mr Petch's "manic depressive psychosis" could not have been diagnosed at any time when he was not being manically depressed or hypomanic. It consequently agreed with the conclusion of the High Court judge who had heard the case that, until the breakdown, Mr Petch had shown himself to be more than able to cope with his existing workload, and that it was "absurd" to suggest that the employer had negligently overloaded him with work.

When Mr Petch returned to work following his breakdown, however, the Court of Appeal found that the employer's duty of care "must have extended to taking reasonable care to ensure that the duties allocated to him did not bring about a repetition of his mental breakdown". What had actually happened, said the Court, was not a repetition of severe depression but a bout of hypomania, which had contributed to Mr Petch becoming a serious disciplinary problem. The Court again agreed with the High Court's conclusion that the employer had not been negligent in its treatment of Mr Petch during this period. It had done its utmost to persuade him to take sick leave and seek medical help, and these efforts had been "entirely justified in the circumstances". Similarly, his transfer to the DHSS was "a sensible solution to an intractable problem", and had, said Lord Justice Dillon, been tactfully handled.

The Walker decision

As Petch indicates, the scope and extent of the employer's duty of care is not static or fixed, since the risks that are reasonably foreseeable will evolve with time, practical experience, the general level of knowledge and information about the risks of stress at work and increasing awareness of the individual circumstances and characteristics of particular employees. It follows that the standard of care - that is, the steps required to avert the risk - will similarly vary. The interplay of a number of these factors is demonstrated in the Walker case.

Mr Walker was employed by Northumberland County Council as an area social services officer, with responsibility for managing four teams of field social workers in the Blyth Valley area of the county. This was predominantly an urban area, and by the mid-1980s it produced a large and rapidly increasing number of child abuse cases. There had, however, been no increase in the number of field workers in the area since 1978. From 1985 onwards, Mr Walker and other area managers repeatedly tried to persuade management to restructure social services in order to provide more field workers for hard-pressed areas. These efforts included proposals either to split the Blyth area into two, or transfer social workers in from rural areas. At a meeting in November 1985, Mr Walker's superior, Mr Davison, said that neither of these solutions would be adopted because of the fact that, within about two years, there was to be a restructuring of social services in the county. Mr Walker said that if things were changed within that period he could go on, but could not see himself going on beyond that time. In the meantime, Mr Walker sought to cope with the increasing pressures by reorganising his own staff. At the end of November 1986, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He remained off work until March 1987.

"Having regard to the reasonably foreseeable size of the risk of repetition of Mr Walker's illness if his duties were not alleviated by effective additional assistance and to the reasonably foreseeable gravity of the mental breakdown which might result if nothing were done, I have come to the conclusion that the standard of care to be expected of a reasonable local authority required that in March 1987 such additional assistance should be provided if not on a permanent basis, at least until restructuring of social services had been effected and the workload on Mr Walker thereby permanently reduced."

(per Mr Justice Colman in Walker v Northumberland County Council)

Before returning to work, Mr Walker again discussed with Mr Davison the possibility of splitting his area in two. Mr Davison would not agree to this, but did agree that, on his return, Mr Walker would be assisted in his duties by Mr Robinson, the officer who had been sent to Blyth to cover for him during his illness. Mr Walker was led to believe that Mr Robinson would be seconded to him for as long as he needed him. Mr Davison also said that he would visit Mr Walker on a weekly basis. In the event, after Mr Walker returned to work he was never visited by Mr Davison and, within a month, Mr Robinson's support had been withdrawn. Mr Walker found that during his absence a substantial volume of paperwork had built up, and the number of pending childcare cases continued to increase at a considerable rate. As a result, he again began to experience symptoms of stress. He took two weeks' holiday in August 1987 but, shortly after his return, the stress symptoms recurred. On 16 September, he was diagnosed as suffering from a stress-related anxiety state and advised to go on sick leave. He subsequently had a second nervous breakdown, and was dismissed by the council on grounds of permanent ill health in February 1988.

Mr Walker claimed damages against the council for breach of its common law duty of care in failing to take reasonable steps to avoid exposing him to a health-endangering workload. He contended that, in the light of the consistent warnings which he had given to his superiors between 1984 and 1987 about the workload in the Blyth area, the council ought to have appreciated that his health was in danger. The council conceded that it owed Mr Walker a general duty to exercise reasonable care to provide him with a reasonably safe working system and to take reasonable steps to protect him from risks which were reasonably foreseeable. It nevertheless argued that there was no breach of that duty here because it was not reasonably foreseeable that Mr Walker's work would impose upon him such stress as to give rise to a real risk of mental illness. Alternatively, if such a risk was foreseeable, the council contended that it did not act unreasonably in failing to relieve the pressure on Mr Walker in view of the budgetary constraints under which it was operating. In the High Court, Mr Justice Colman reached the following conclusions.

The Court consequently rejected the council's argument that because the extent to which the council provided social services to the public in a particular area was a discretionary or policy decision in respect of the exercise of statutory powers, as distinct from an operational one, its decision not to disrupt services merely to enable it to support Mr Walker could not amount to a breach of its duty of care towards him. Just as it would be no defence to a claim for the non-performance of a contract for the sale of goods that the local authority had resolved as a matter of policy that the use of its resources for the performance of the contract was inexpedient, so it would be no defence to a claim for breach of the implied term in a contract of employment that the employer would exercise reasonable care for the safety of its employees that its failure to do so was the result of a policy decision on the exercise of its statutory powers.

Accordingly, said Colman J, the crucial question was whether the council ought to have foreseen that Mr Walker was exposed to a risk of mental illness materially higher than that which would ordinarily affect a social services manager in his position with a really heavy workload. It was therefore necessary to ask whether there was anything in Mr Walker's conduct or any information about his work which ought to have alerted the council, and Mr Davison in particular, to the fact that Mr Walker was reaching breaking point or at least was subject to a materially greater than ordinary risk of mental breakdown. On the evidence, Colman J was not persuaded that before Mr Walker's first illness the council (Mr Davison in particular) ought to have appreciated that he was not only dissatisfied and frustrated with his job, but that he was at a materially greater than normal risk of stress-induced mental illness.

Walker under appeal

The employer in Walker has lodged an appeal to the Court of Appeal, and this is expected to be heard around the middle of 1996. There has as yet been no award of damages, although it is understood that Mr Walker will be seeking compensation well in excess of £200,000. The council's appeal will focus primarily on the High Court's findings on the impact of resources, budgetary constraints and policy decisions on the reasonableness of the council's actions or omissions.

Perhaps of more interest, Mr Walker intends to cross-appeal against the judge's finding that his first breakdown was not reasonably foreseeable in the circumstances. It certainly seems to us that Colman J's reasoning on this point is perhaps less than convincing, and may even contain a misdirection in law. He specifically found that by 1985 it was reasonably foreseeable that there was some risk that Mr Walker might suffer some sort of mental illness as a result of the stresses of his work. He then went on to ask whether this risk was "materially higher" than that which would ordinarily affect a middle manager in a comparable position. This would seem to erect a further barrier to the employee establishing his claim, and arguably imposes a higher legal and evidential burden than is justified by the law as it presently stands. An employer may in most cases completely ignore only trivial or negligible risks, and Colman J makes no finding to this effect in Mr Walker's case. The fact that there had been no recorded incidence of mental illness amongst comparable employees did not necessarily prevent the risk from being reasonably foreseeable, in the sense of being a risk that the employer ought to have appreciated given the inherently stressful nature of childcare social work, the increasing workload in Mr Walker's area and the lack of adequate resources.

Developing state of knowledge

Although the outcome of personal injury cases depends very much on their own facts, it is likely to become increasingly difficult in the future for employers to argue that they could not, or ought not, to have foreseen some risk of stress-induced physical or psychiatric damage to their employees. Given the publicity surrounding the Walker case, it may be expected that employers will have a greater awareness of the dangers of work-related stress. Employers are also expected to keep reasonably abreast of relevant statutory and advisory material on the hazards of work. If they fail to do so, they will normally be deemed to know of its existence. This material now includes, for example, the HSE guide on stress and the Guidance Notes accompanying the Display Screen Equipment Regulations (see pp.3-4 above). Similarly, the risk assessment requirements under the Management Regulations, and the need to comply with the general duties under s.2 of the HSW Act, mean that employers will ignore stress-related risks to their employees' physical and psychological health and safety at their peril.

It cannot safely be assumed that an employer will always be required to act only after the employee in question has already suffered some incidence of psychiatric or stress-related illness. Even where work is "intrinsically" stressful and demanding, it may well be that in the future a court will conclude that an employer ought reasonably to have foreseen such a risk at a much earlier stage, and taken steps to protect the employee at that point.

Complete inaction inadvisable

The nature and extent of the steps required will vary as the perception and magnitude of risk increases. But as soon as the risk becomes more than a trivial or negligible possibility, the employer is likely to be under a duty to take some, albeit perhaps limited, steps to avert it. For example, in Gillespie v Commonwealth of Australia, the plaintiff, a diplomat, was posted to a new diplomatic mission in Caracas, Venezuela, where his health broke down with an "anxiety state". He alleged that his employer had been negligent in posting him to Venezuela without warning him of, or protecting him against, the rigours of life there (including bribery, personal abuse, robberies, transport problems and the high cost of living).

The Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory held that in considering whether the employer had discharged its duty of reasonable care, it had to consider whether it was reasonably foreseeable that the plaintiff or a person in his position might be subject to some sort of psychological decomposition, beyond the difficulties and stresses to which most officers would ordinarily be prone in the circumstances which prevailed in Caracas at the time of the plaintiff's service. The discharge of the employers duty of care in this case required that any such officer posted to Caracas be given some preparation beyond that which was appropriate to less stressful posts. It was unreasonable to withhold from the plaintiff information that this was a new post with difficulties as great, if not greater, than any other Australian diplomatic post.

However, in view of the remoteness of the possibility that an officer would be subject to such an extreme reaction as that of the plaintiff, reasonableness did not require the employer to give more than the most general warning and description of the circumstances which would render it difficult to cope with conditions in the post. Reasonableness did not require the employer to repatriate the plaintiff after his arrival at any time sooner than the date of his eventual departure for Caracas, nor to give him counselling beyond that which he received both before and after the date of the onset of his anxiety state, or to pay him an increased allowance.

Given the plaintiff's previously expressed enthusiasm for a challenging post in South America, the Court found that a general warning or description of the type required here was unlikely to have deterred him from applying for or accepting the posting in Caracas, and was therefore unlikely to have averted the damage of which he complained. The plaintiff's claim was consequently dismissed.

Causation

In reality, the decision in Gillespie turned on a finding that the employer's failure to issue a warning was not ultimately the effective cause of the employee's illness.

Obviously, potential liability will always be precluded if the evidence shows that the injury was not caused by the employer's breach of duty, but by factors occurring outside the workplace (for example, family or other pressures), or possibly where an underlying psychological or physical condition would have manifested itself at the same point in time irrespective of the employer's actions (see, for example, another Australian case, Wodrow v Commonwealth of Australia). Similarly, the level of compensation will be affected if there were concurrent causes of injury, or it is judged that an underlying medical condition would in any case have become apparent at some point in the future.

"Egg shell" personalities

Otherwise, once it is established that the risk of stress-related personal injury was reasonably foreseeable, and that an employee's injury was wholly or in part caused by the employer's breach of duty, the employer "takes its victim as it finds him or her ". This means that an employee's claim will not be defeated merely because the precise nature of the injury or illness which has occurred was not foreseeable. The employer is therefore potentially liable for the full extent of any illness actually suffered by the employee. The fact that the employee may be particularly susceptible to, for example, mental illness, or that the illness that is suffered takes a rare form or is more serious than might ordinarily be expected, is irrelevant.

This merely represents the application of what is known generally as the "egg-shell skull" or "egg-shell personality" rule. For example, in the Australian case of Mount Isa Mines Ltd v Pusey (see further below), the plaintiff went to the aid of two fellow employees who had been injured in an electrical explosion, and who subsequently died of shocking burns. The plaintiff later developed a serious form of schizophrenia, for which he was compensated. It was enough that some form of psychiatric injury - not necessarily the particular injury which actually occurred - was foreseeable.

Most recently, in Page v Smith, the House of Lords affirmed that, where a primary duty of care is established, foreseeability of personal injury, whether physical or psychiatric, is sufficient. In that case, the defendant was consequently held liable for the recurrence of the plaintiff's post-viral fatigue syndrome (that is, ME), which had become chronic and permanent as a result of a car accident caused by the defendant's negligence.

Areas of uncertainty

Notwithstanding the developments discussed above, some cases suggest that not every claim in relation to stress-related psychiatric injuries sustained by employees whilst at work can be framed within the terms of the employer's general common law duty of care. This has particularly been the case where workers have allegedly suffered purely from "nervous shock", in the form of an identifiable psychiatric illness, as a result of their involvement in or witnessing of a specific incident or accident caused by their employer's negligence. In an extreme example, in one recent case employees were categorised as mere "bystanders" when they witnessed an accident in which one of their colleagues died as a result of their employer's negligence, and were held to be unable to claim from their employer for their consequent psychiatric illnesses (Robertson and Rough v Forth Road Bridge Joint Board).

Some of these decisions must be regarded as somewhat anachronistic, and would seem clearly to overlap with the employer's common law duty to provide a safe system of work as it is now developing. Others, such as Robertson, quite possibly run counter to the general principles of liability for personal injury recently stated by the House of Lords in Page v Smith. We summarise the most important points below.

It has been suggested that this decision was in fact based directly upon the employer's duty of care to its employees, and there seems to be no reason in principle why this should not have been the case. Indeed, employers now have a statutory obligation under the Management Regulations to establish procedures to be followed by any employee if situations of serious and imminent danger arise (reg. 7). It is thus arguable that a failure to establish clear procedures and communicate them to the workforce could be prima facie evidence of a breach of the employer's common law duty to employees who suffer personal injury as a result of any confusion about their roles in such circumstances.

In Galt v British Railways Board, a train driver employed by BRB thought he had killed two other BRB employees who were on the track in front of him due to BRB's negligence. He subsequently suffered a heart attack, and BRB was found liable for the injury. Mr Justice Tudor Evans held that BRB owed the driver a duty in law "to take reasonable care not to expose him to injury from nervous shock". Once again, this case would now seem to be more appropriately dealt with in the context of the employer's duty to provide a reasonably safe system of work.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the employees in the Robertson case (above) were involved in the same task as the colleague who was killed. One of them was driving the vehicle from which the deceased fell, and the other was following "a few feet behind" in a small patrol van. It seems to us that to categorise employees in this situation as mere bystanders, as the Court of Session did, is perverse. We would submit that in these circumstances employees should retain the protection of the employer's common law duty of care, and should not have to demonstrate any further proximity to the incident. There is no doubt that if either of the plaintiffs in Robertson had suffered physical injury as a result of the incident which caused their colleague's death, the employer would have been liable. This being the case, the conclusion of the Court cannot stand in the light of Page v Smith. If physical injury would have been foreseeable as a result of the employer's negligence, liability should in principle have followed even if the employees suffered psychological damage alone.

Stress at work 1: main points to note

Stressful characteristics of work¹⁰

The context of work

The content of work

The "Working Time" Directive

The EC "Working Time" Directive (No. 93/104/EEC) requires Member States to take measures to ensure compliance with the following key requirements by 23 November 1996:

Note

Notwithstanding the fact that the general 48-hour limit may be exceeded by agreement, and that there is a fairly extensive list of derogations from many of the Directive's central provisions for specified groups of workers, the UK has lodged a challenge to the legal basis of the Directive. The Government argues, amongst other things, that the Directive is not a genuine "health and safety" measure and should not therefore have been passed under the qualified majority voting procedure provided for in Article 118A of the Treaty of Rome. It has therefore asked the ECJ either to annul the Directive in its entirety, or effectively to annul articles 4, 5, 6 and 7 outlined above. The case will not be heard until November 1995 at the earliest, and possibly not before March 1996.

Case list

Aston v Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd 21.5.92 High Court

Chadwick v British Railways Board [1967] All ER 945

Dooley v Cammell Laird & Co Ltd and another [1951] 1 Lloyd's Rep 271

Edwards v National Coal Board [1949] 1 All ER 743

Frost and others v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire and others 10.4.95 High Court

Galt v British Railways Board 20.5.83 High Court

Gillespie v Commonwealth of Australia (1991) 104 ACTR 1

Mount Isa Mines Ltd v Pusey (1970) 125 CLR 383

Page v Smith [1995] 2 All ER 736

Petch v Commissioners of Customs and Excise [1993] ICR 789

Prime v Hosking [1995] IRLR 143

Robertson and Rough v Forth Road Bridge Joint Board[1995] IRLR 251

Walker v Northumberland County Council [1995] IRLR 35

Wodrow v Commonwealth of Australia (1993) FCR 52

¹ "Taking the stress out of work", Labour Research, July 1995.

² Health and Safety Commission Annual Report 1991/92, pp.96 and 97.

³ "Preventing stress at work: an MSF guide", MSF Health and Safety Information no.40, 1995.

⁴ "Stress at work, a guide for employers", HSE Books, 1995. Available from HSE Books, PO Box 1999, Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 6FS, price £5.25.

⁵ Case heard at Dewsbury Magistrates' Court, 14.2.95.

⁶ SI 1992 No.2051.

⁷ SI 1992 No. 2792.

⁸ SI 1992 No. 3004.

⁹ "The role and status of Approved Codes of Practice", HSC consultative document, 1995.

¹⁰ From "Stress research and stress management: putting theory to work", by Tom Cox, HSE Contract Research Report no. 61/1993.