Foreseeability in Workplace Stress Claims

With Stress Awareness Week 2025 having recently placed a spotlight on the condition, this month is a timely opportunity to reflect on the importance of mental health in the workplace. In a world which can feel increasingly strained and volatile, including ongoing cost-of-living pressures, it is no surprise that stress continues to affect employees in the UK. Though stress remains a prevalent problem, this article offers a reminder of the importance of foreseeability when assessing occupational stress claims.

The Health & Safety Executive’s most recent statistics report that 776,000 workers suffered from work-related stress, depression or anxiety and that such instances accounted for 16.4 million working days lost over the course of 2023/2024.

However, while there is no doubt that this amounts to a significant volume of instances of stress, this does not mean that all such instances give rise to a valid claim for occupational stress against an employer.

Stress claims have complex considerations with respect to breach of duty and medical causation, but a key issue in such claims remains foreseeability of harm, and whether an injury is foreseeable to the employer will very much be dependent upon the facts of the case. Nevertheless, employers are generally entitled to assume that employees can handle the standard pressures of a job, and an occupation is not in itself likely to be considered inherently hazardous to one’s mental health.

Foreseeability typically requires the employer to have specific knowledge that the affected employee was at risk of the specific injury suffered, not simply a risk of a psychiatric injury generally. The court has identified that relevant factors can include the nature of the role, the demands being placed on the employee and how that compares to others in the same role, and whether there are clear signs that the employee is at risk of impending harm. In the case of MacLennan v Hartford Europe Ltd [2012] EWHC 346 (QB), the court suggested that foreseeability could be satisfied if the employer had already encountered employees becoming ill as a result of carrying out their work or if they were aware of an employee being vulnerable where the employee had previously had a psychiatric reaction due to a specific work-related stress.

However, previous absence due to a psychiatric injury does not in itself create foreseeability. The case of Easton v B & Q Plc [2015] EWHC 880 (QB) demonstrates this well, where a store manager, who had returned to work after a period of absence with depression, alleged that he suffered a relapse after agreeing to take on additional work during his planned return. The court did not accept that the injury was foreseeable and required the employer to know that offering the temporary post, which the claimant had accepted, would result in the recurrence of the condition. The original absence had not related to that circumstance.

Indeed, case law includes considerations as to whether the employer had sufficient knowledge of the employee’s particular personality and medical history in order to establish foreseeability. Further, if an employee has failed to disclose a previous condition or not made complaints or given the employer cause to have concerns, these too could be reasons that the injury may not have been foreseeable.

So, while work-related stress continues to be a feature of ill health across the country, and there is no doubt that there is broader recognition of issues relating to mental well-being in the UK, foreseeability will remain a crucial factor in considering the validity of work-related stress claims.

Author

Brendan Riley

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