There are apparently over 180,000 self-reported occupational stress cases a year.

This is costing the country approximately £7 billion per annum in lost production.In recent months there have been a number of such cases before the courts.

Some of these are being appealed and Lady Justice Hale will be hearing the cases in the Court of Appeal before the close of the year.

She will hopefully take the opportunity of reviewing the law in relation to occupational stress claims and particularly the approach of Mr Justice Colman in Walker v Northumbria County Council [1994] 1 All ER 737.In Walker, three questions were identified in assessing the prospects of success.

These are:a) Whether the claimant's work has created a reasonably foreseeable risk of psychiatric injury?b) If so, whether the system of work in place was reasonable? and,c) If there had been a reasonable foreseeable risk of psychiatric injury, and the system of work was not reasonable, had the failure to adopt a reasonable system caused the claimant's injury?The media continues to highlight settlements out of court.

In the past few weeks there has been a report of a settlement in Conway v Worcestershire County Council, 5 September 2001, for a social worker who was asked to run a home for the elderly with no training.

She received £140,000.In terms of decided cases, it appears that the defining question as to whether a claimant will have prospects of success or not is whether the work had created a reasonably foreseeable risk of psychiatric injury.

The Court of Appeal in Garrett v London Borough of Camden, 16 March 2001, adopted the judgement of Lord Justice Dillon in Petch v Customs and Excise [1993] ICR 789, which they said was 'a helpful guide to the issue of foreseeability'.

Lord Justice Dillon stated that 'unless senior management in the defendant's department were aware or ought to have been aware that the cla imant 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, then the defendants were not negligent in failing to prevent the breakdown'.Adopting this approach claimants have been unsuccessful in a number of cases including Levy v Allied Dunbar Insurance,4 December 2000, in which Judge Inglis found that despite the fact that the defendants were 'an aggressively ambitious organisation' they should 'not have foreseen any greater susceptibility from pressures of work than that which would have been expected of them in the case of anyone else who they employed as a senior manager'.Similarly, in Garrett, Lord Justice Simon Brown found that 'unless there is a real risk of a breakdown which the claimant's employers ought reasonably to have foreseen and which they ought properly to have averted there can be no liability'.

Unfortunately, Mr Garrett was, according to the judge at first instance 'to a large extent his own worst enemy'.

He represented himself at the appeal taking along 11 bundles of documents.Foreseeability was also the cause of a recent finding against the claimant in Armstrong v Secretary of State of the Home Department, 8 October 2001, QBD Mr Justice Owen.The claimant, a prison officer, was involved with supervisory arrangements during the trial of Rosemary West on 10 counts of murder in 1995.

She alleged that she was exposed to a reasonably foreseeable risk of psychiatric injury because of the time she had to spend with West, and that she was actively encouraged to establish a close relationship in order to prevent her from committing suicide.

The judge, applying the Walker principles, found that in fact that wasn't the case and it was the claimant's own fault that she had allowed herself to become too closely involved with the prisoner.

There was nothing in her background and no other features of her work which gave rise to a foreseeable risk of psychiatric injury.We await with interest the findings of the Court of Appeal in the cases to be decided later this year.

Walker still remains settled law some six years after the trial.

The case was due to head to the Court of Appeal before it settled.

Whilst the claimant was undoubtedly happy to have his case concluded, from a lawyer's perspective it would have been of considerable interest to have seen how the Court of Appeal would have approached this area of PI law in what is perceived by many to be the commencement of claims for occupational stress.