Success for David Platt KC and Juliet Stevens in the Jersey Court of Appeal
18th Sep 2026
Outline
David Platt KC and Juliet Stevens were instructed on behalf of the Channel Islands Cooperative Society Limited in its successful appeal before the Court of Appeal of Jersey. Judgment was handed down on 1 September 2026. They worked alongside Jersey advocate, Jeremy Heywood, from BCR Law of St Helier.
This was a “stress at work” claim brought by the Society’s ex-CEO. At first instance the Plaintiff was awarded damages of c. £3.5 million. The Society was found liable to him for psychiatric injury caused by his treatment at work. On appeal, the judgment was reversed and the claim failed entirely.
Stress at work claims in Jersey are determined in accordance with the law of England and Wales. Thus, this decision of the Jersey Court of Appeal is potentially of direct relevance to practitioners in this jurisdiction.
The claim and its appeal engaged various important issues of legal principle including the application of the ‘Yapp exceptional circumstances’ proviso on foreseeability and the ‘Johnson exclusion zone’ in cases where an employee develops psychiatric injury and is later dismissed.
Foreseeability
The Jersey Court of Appeal found that the Royal Court had been “plainly wrong” when it found the injury to have been foreseeable. Thus, the first instance finding of liability was overturned, and the Plaintiff’s claim accordingly failed. It declined to overturn findings of fact at first instance and proceeded on the footing that the first instance findings were correct.
It had been conceded at trial that, prior to the manifestation of the Plaintiff’s psychiatric condition, he had shown no signs of vulnerability to such injury and that no one in fact (including the Plaintiff) had foreseen psychiatric illness when it occurred.
As a result, the Plaintiff was required to rely on dicta of Underhill LJ in Yapp v Foreign and Commonwealth Office [2014] EWCA Civ 1512 that while psychiatric injury would not “usually be foreseeable unless there were indications, of which the employer was or should have been aware, of some problem or psychological vulnerability on the part of the employee” per Hatton v Sutherland [2002] EWCA Civ 76, [2002] 2 All ER 1 “each case depends on its own facts, and in principle the employer’s conduct in a particular case might be so devastating that it was foreseeable that even a person of ordinary robustness might develop a depressive illness as a result …”. This has been termed the “Yapp exceptional circumstances proviso”.
The Jersey Court of Appeal accepted the Society’s argument that the evaluative determination of whether the conduct had been “so devastating” as to render psychiatric injury foreseeable fell within its appellate jurisdiction.
The Court found that this high threshold was not satisfied on the facts as found. It reiterated that foreseeability of strong adverse emotional impact or psychological harm falling short of a clinical diagnostic threshold is not to be equated with foreseeability of psychiatric injury. As such, the Yapp threshold had not been crossed (and indeed it is unclear that it has ever been surmounted in a decided English case). This was sufficient to dispose of the appeal.
Johnson
The Court nevertheless continued to consider “a difficult and novel point” stemming from the House of Lords’ decisions of Johnson v Unisys Limited [2003] 1 AC 518 and Eastwood v Magnox Electric plc [2005] 1 AC 503. Those decisions underlie the so-called Johnson ‘exception’ or ‘exclusion zone’, the effect of which is that dismissal from employment and the losses arising therefrom, including any psychiatric injury caused, are non-actionable in the civil courts. These matters remain solely within the jurisdiction of the employment tribunal.
The Johnson exception had been addressed in a Jersey case only once before, in McDonald v Parish of St Helier [2005] JRC 074, [2005] JLR 21. In that case the Royal Court applied the exception without hearing any substantial argument as to whether it was correct to do so. It was also common ground in this case, both at first instance and on appeal, that Johnson and Eastwood applied.
The Jersey Court of Appeal held that while the Royal Court had correctly set out the principles arising from these cases, those principles had not then been correctly applied to the facts in this case. That failure could have had a major impact on the level of damages awarded.
The Jersey Court of Appeal held that had the Society been liable to the Plaintiff as alleged, it would have remitted the matter for determination of quantum. The Johnson exception requires apportionment of injury. It would have been for the Royal Court to draw a line between that injury caused by the pre-dismissal wrongful conduct and that caused by the dismissal, with only the former being compensable.
Finally, the Court (obiter) noted that whether the Johnson exception is in fact part of the law of Jersey remained an open one: “in the end whether the employment protection legislation in Jersey was intended to supplant a dismissed employee’s right to sue for psychiatric injury resulting from the manner of his or her dismissal has to be decided on the basis of legislative intent derived from the Jersey legislation”.
