The States Employment Board has successfully overturned a ruling that it discriminated against a Revenue Jersey employee by dismissing her while she was suffering from work-related stress.

Jacqueline Murphy was dismissed in February 2024, having been absent from work since September 2023.

The Employment and Discrimination Tribunal later ruled that her stress amounted to a disability and that her dismissal by the States Employment Board – the employer for all public sector employees in Jersey – was therefore discriminatory and automatically unfair.

But the Royal Court has now overturned that decision after finding that the tribunal failed to distinguish properly between work-related stress and a mental impairment protected under Jersey’s discrimination law.

Commissioner Sir Timothy Le Cocq said symptoms including anxiety, panic attacks, low mood and sleeping difficulties did not, by themselves, prove the existence of a mental impairment.

The tribunal had relied on three medical letters when concluding that Ms Murphy’s stress constituted a disability.

However, the only contemporaneous Occupational Health report, prepared after an assessment in January 2024, said that she was “lucid and rational with no signs of specific mental illness”.

It found no evidence of an underlying mental illness and concluded that her difficulties were directly related to circumstances at work.

The tribunal discounted that assessment partly because the doctor had met Ms Murphy only once.

Sir Timothy said the tribunal had failed to provide a “clear and cogent explanation” for doing so, particularly as the other medical evidence largely recorded what Ms Murphy had told those treating her rather than providing a formal diagnosis.

He said the tribunal’s reasoning from her symptoms and behaviour to their cause was “unclear and flawed”.

The Royal Court also found that the tribunal’s conclusion that dismissal was disproportionate was inconsistent with its own findings.

The tribunal had accepted that the States Employment Board conducted two investigations and made reasonable efforts to resolve Ms Murphy’s concerns, but found that she was “not willing to compromise”.

It also concluded that some of her behaviour illustrated “character traits” rather than a “mental impairment”.

Ms Murphy had been offered a comparable alternative role within Revenue Jersey but rejected it without seeking further information or giving a reason at the time.

The tribunal nevertheless ruled against the States Employment Board because it had not explored whether she could take another job elsewhere.

But Sir Timothy said that, in light of the tribunal’s other findings and the evidence before it, it was “difficult, to say the least” to understand why it decided that Ms Murphy had a mental impairment or that the States Employment Board’s actions were disproportionate.

Upholding the appeal, he said that work-related stress can cause difficulties without necessarily amounting to a disability under the law.