The employee in this case was an administrative assistant in social services and worked mainly on reception. Her duties changed and she was required to deliver mail to different parts of the building. She suffered a fall on some stairs and sprained her wrist. She said it was because she had been carrying bulky and heavy items and couldn't use the railings when going up stairs.
The claimant took a County Court claim against her employers and the court found that she had lied - there were no bulky items and she had simply lost her footing. Nonetheless, the judge found against the employer because it had not carried out a risk assessment before requiring the employee to undertake the new duties. The judge encouraged the employer to appeal against this 'health and safety gone mad" and they did.
The Court of Appeal has upheld the appeal. A risk assessment was not required in order to avoid liability - the work did not CAUSE the accident. The Court accepted previous case law which showed that "that once a prima facie connection is established between the risky activity and the injury, it is for the employer to disprove causation, not for the employee to prove that, if all possible precautions had been taken, he would not have suffered injury."
However, there was no causal link in this case - the County Court had found that the employee slipped:
"Liability under Regulation 4 of the 1992 Regulations is only established on proof of a causal breach of duty. Here the Defendant was arguably in breach of duty in failing to carry out a risk assessment in relation to the task which it asked the Claimant to perform. But on the facts found by the judge, the accident which befell the Claimant did not fall within the ambit of the risk which the Defendant was arguably required to assess. The Claimant simply misjudged her footing when climbing a staircase whilst she happened to be carrying one or more items of post. Her accident was wholly causally unconnected with the circumstance that she was at the time carrying one or more items of post. The circumstance that the Claimant was carrying post may perhaps be described as the occasion for her injury, but it was not a cause of it."
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