Employment Law Cases

Woodhead v WTTV Ltd

An employee’s claim against his employer in negligence, based on the way his employer had handled a harassment complaint against him, succeeded as it breached the duty of care owed to him by his employer.

Background

Mr Woodhead was the Managing Director of WTTV. He had a history of psychiatric conditions, including depression and anxiety, and had been a recovering alcoholic since 1991. On 28 November 2019 he was called into a meeting where he was told about complaints of sexual harassment that had been made against him (related to events in 2017-18). He was not told the purpose of the meeting in advance or given a copy of the complaint. He was required to respond to the complaints there and then, in a lengthy meeting. He was then suspended while further investigation took place. Mr Woodhead subsequently experienced a recurrence of a serious depressive illness. His employment was terminated by reason of redundancy on 8 May 2020 – he’d been given notice of termination before the allegations came to light.

Mr Woodhead filed three claims in the High Court against WTTV, primarily seeking damages for psychiatric injury with a focus on negligence. He argued that WTTV owed him a duty of care as his employer to prevent foreseeable psychiatric injury, particularly during the disciplinary process.

High Court decision

Mr Woodhead’s claim in negligence was partially successful, with the compensation for psychiatric harm to be determined at a further hearing.

The court found that it was reasonably foreseeable that Mr Woodhead was at risk of psychiatric injury because of his medical history. Once the employer knew about that, aspects of how it approached the continuing disciplinary investigation were a breach of its duty of care. These included:

• out of five allegations, the employer decided that two would not be pursued and one would only be pursued in part – this was never communicated to Mr Woodhead, and he was instead repeatedly asked for his account for all five allegations
• unreasonably pressing for the continuation of the disciplinary procedure after Mr Woodhead’s admission to hospital and while he remained on sick leave
• attempting to continue the disciplinary process during Mr Woodhead’s absence when he was not fit to participate, and
• trying to require him to see an OH adviser when the potential benefits were limited and the employer already had sufficient medical evidence

Comment

The relevant duty of care in this case was that an employer will not, in the course of an individual’s employment, expose them to an unreasonable risk of foreseeable psychiatric injury. The four key elements to this are:

1. Claims for psychiatric injury arising from employment will not succeed unless it was reasonably foreseeable that the employee could suffer an injury to health attributable to stress at work.
2. Reasonable foreseeability depends on what the employer knew or ought reasonably to have known – here Mr Woodhead’s employer accepted that from 4 December 2019 it had the required knowledge of foreseeable risk of harm to his health from stress at work because of the disciplinary procedure.
3. An employer may assume that an employee will withstand the usual pressures of a job ‘unless he knows of some particular problem or vulnerability’.
4. An employer will only be in breach of the duty when it fails to take the steps that are reasonable in the circumstances, bearing in mind the magnitude of the risk of harm occurring, the gravity of the harm which may occur, the costs and practicality of preventing it, and the justifications for running the risk.

Whilst this was a personal injury claim pursued via the civil courts rather than the employment tribunal, it does serve as a useful reminder of the care needed when faced with employees suffering from mental health conditions.

Once an employer is on notice of the risk of foreseeable injury to an employee, especially via medical evidence, they have a duty of care to act reasonably, not just to avoid harm, but also to reasonably manage any ongoing processes which generate and pose the risk of harm (such as disciplinary proceedings).

It does not mean that disciplinary proceedings cannot be started, but that they should be dealt with in a more sensitive way in terms of support for the employee and the information given and when.