Where is the need to tackle work-related stress, depression and anxiety in law?

 

The need to protect your workers, and potentially others, from work-related stress, depression and anxiety falls under the provision sections 2 and 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Like other hazards the employer needs to do a risk assessment and act on it.

Mental health, just like physical health and safety, comes under your general duty as an employer to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of your workers and people who are affected by your work.

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regs 1999 explain how to comply; requiring a dutyholder to assess the level of risk from workplace hazards.

Where a risk is identified, the dutyholder should take all reasonably practical measures to remove, prevent or tackle the risk to reduce it as far as possible.

Schedule 1 gives a hierarchy of approaches to avoid or prevent the risk as the first level of intervention, then measures that will tackle any remaining risk and, only then, measures that support workers that may still be adversely affected.

Because stress, depression and anxiety may be, or may lead to, a disability within the terms of the Equality Act 2010, dutyholders may need to consider the requirement for “reasonable adjustments” that will get the worker back into, and keep them in, work.