Ex-fiscal's stress case thrown out

Judge dismisses £120,000 claim for stress at work

News, 11 November 2005

A former procurator fiscal's case against the Crown Office for stress caused by work has been dismissed as irrelevant by a judge.

The action for £120,000 damages was brought by Pauline Chapman for alleged psychiatric harm suffered while working in the procurator fiscal's office in Stirling. She left work in January 1999.

The Court of Session in Edinburgh heard that Ms Chapman thought she was due compensation because of negligence and alleged fault on the part of her former line manager Cameron Ritchie, the procurator fiscal in Stirling at the time.

Ms Chapman said she had left work because of stress and had been unable to return. She said she regularly told Mr Ritchie that she was finding it difficult to cope, and that she was suffering from headaches and having to take painkillers regularly. She said she often had to take work home and that the office was short-staffed. Mr Ritchie did little or nothing to ease the burden on her though he knew she was intermittently absent from work with a variety of symptoms. She also claimed negligence against Lord Hardie, the former Lord Advocate and now a judge in the supreme courts.

The Lord Advocate denied liability and sought to have the action dismissed at a procedural hearing.

Temporary Judge Roderick Macdonald QC said Ms Chapman's case did not support the existence of a duty of care by Mr Ritchie in relation to psychiatric injury. He commented:

"There is no dispute on the pleadings that from September 1997 [Ms Chapman] was off work for short periods for physical ailments which she herself did not at the time relate to stress at work. There was no other reason, such as, for example, a letter from a GP, for Mr Ritchie to relate her absences to stress at work. In my opinion the factual averments made by the pursuer are wholly inadequate to form a basis for saying that Mr Ritchie knew or ought reasonably to have known that she was liable to suffer psychiatric illness as a result of stress at work and her case against him is therefore bound to fail."

It followed, he continued, that the case against Lord Hardie was also bound to fail. There was no monitoring duty on the part of an employer to take reasonable care to prevent psychiatric injury to his workforce in general.

Temporary Judge Macdonald's opinion can be read at http://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/opinions/2005CSOH148.html .