Unfair dismissal compensation

Employment law By Martin Edwards, Mace & Jones, LiverpoolClancy v Cannock Chase Technical College and another (2001) IRLR 331On the facts of this case, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) decided that a tribunal had been wrong to compute an employee's compensation for unfair dismissal by assessing lost pension rights solely on the basis of the employer's contributions.

Such an approach is not appropriate in the case of a pension scheme which yields not only income benefit but also a lump sum arising out of right, rather than by commutation.

The 1991 guidelines on compensation for loss of pension rights provide no yardstick for the computation of loss in such a case.

The EAT uttered a plea that careful consideration be given as to whether the 1991 guidelines should be updated so as to give tribunals 'the assistance they deserve in this most difficult element of the calculation of loss in unfair dismissal cases'.Work-induced stressCross and another v Highland & Islands Enterprise & another (2001) IRLR 336In this case - hailed in the Industrial Relations Law Reports highlights as a 'breakthrough' - the Court of Session held that employers owed an employee (who committed suicide following a period of work-related stress) a duty to take reasonable care not to expose him to working conditions which were 'reasonably foreseeably likely' to subject him to such stress as to be likely to cause him psychiatric injury.

It is right in principle, according to the Court of Session, to treat the risk of psychiatric injury in the same way as the risk of physical injury.

Liability in respect of psychiatric injury does not arise only where the injury takes the form of nervous shock, that is to say, a sudden assault on the nervous system.Noting that the employer's duty of care is owed to each employee as an individual, the Court of Session pointed out that the employee must therefore take into account any particular susceptibility of the employee of which he is or ought to be aware.