Published: Saturday, 5th July, 2008 11:00
O2 manager fights for £110k ‘stress’ cash
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A BUSINESSWOMAN for O2 who was awarded nearly £110,000 for work stress must await the outcome of an appeal before she can walk away with her pay-out.
Susan Dickins, who worked her way up to a key management role within O2, which is based in Slough, claims she was denied the support and relief she desperately required when the strain of her job began to grind her down.
Ms Dickins, 44, of Taplow, who had acquired an expertise in accountancy, moved to O2’s Bath Road, Slough branch in late 2001, taking up a role as regulatory and finance manager. Here she said she was left to shoulder the burden of a gruelling audit on her own demanding ‘super-human effort’ to complete the task before deadline. By March 2002 she was ‘mentally exhausted and drained’ and by June 13 she was already off sick and was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder.
Ms Dickens was awarded a total of £109,754 for work-related psychiatric problems by a judge at Oxford County Court in December last year, but on Monday O2 mounted an appeal at London’s Civil Appeal Court to challenge the judge’s findings, seeking to reverse the award.
In the county court case, the judge said the onset of Ms Dickens’ condition should have been “reasonably forseeable” to O2, but this week Bruce Gardiner, for O2, argued O2 had an effective in-house counselling service in place to which Ms Dickins could have resorted, adding that the company had taken diligent steps to refer her case to its Occupational Health department.
Ms Dickins has not worked since she first went off with stress six years ago and has been on medication most of that time.
Speaking to the Observer this week, she said: “The actual stress manifested itself as a severe depression and anxiety. It has been horrendous, I have got into debt problems and I am on benefit. Basically you have to just rely on your GP and try and get yourself better but it has been very traumatic. It is a hard slog and it is still not over until I get the court of appeal decision.
“They hope to do it by the end of this month, that will be a big relief. But I won’t be well, it will be a slow recovery, and my GP agrees that I will never return to that kind of work with a lot of pressure and deadlines. I won’t be able to recover the job level that I had.”
After the day-long legal argument Lord Justice Sedley recognised the importance of the case by reserving the Appeal Court’s decision until a later, unspecified, date.
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