The university had a stress policy, and data suggesting stress wasn’t a problem. The regulator disagreed.
For years, work-related stress sat in a comfortable grey area. Everyone agreed it mattered, the law technically covered it, and enforcement focused on scaffolding and forklifts. In December 2025, that changed.
What happened.
On 11 December 2025 the Health and Safety Executive served a Notice of Contravention on the University of Birmingham for failing to manage the risk of work-related stress.
The road there was long. The university’s branch of the University and College Union had raised concerns about workloads from 2022, and made a formal complaint to the HSE in April 2024. The HSE inspected in 2025, reviewing policies and interviewing staff across the university.
It found the university in material breach of health and safety law, specifically the duty to assess and control risk under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. The university was required to respond with a time-bound action plan.
The detail that matters.
The university wasn’t without paperwork. It had a stress policy and a risk assessment. The problem, according to the HSE, was that none of it worked in practice.
According to Times Higher Education, which saw the HSE’s report, the university had concluded stress was not a significant issue. It reached that view partly from its sickness absence rates, how often staff used the employee assistance programme, and referrals to occupational health.
Those are the exact numbers most organisations use to reassure themselves. As we’ve written before, absence figures are the smallest part of the picture, and the people struggling most often keep turning up.
Law firm commentary on the notice picks out the same themes: no effective way for staff to report stress, inconsistent manager training, little understanding of where the high-risk areas were, and too little consultation with the people doing the work.
Why it applies to you.
Nothing about these findings is specific to universities. Swap the institution’s name for yours and ask the same questions:
Do you know which teams carry the heaviest risk of stress?
Could a member of staff report it, and would anything happen?
Are your managers trained to spot it? Across the UK, only 29% are (CIPD, 2025).
Does your risk assessment rely on absence and EAP data to tell you all is well?
The HSE has been signalling this for a while. Its strategy makes reducing work-related ill health, with a focus on mental health, a priority. Stress, depression and anxiety now account for 62% of all working days lost to work-related ill health.
The standard worth knowing.
ISO 45003, published in 2021, is the international standard for managing psychosocial risk at work. It isn’t law, but it sets out what good looks like: treating psychological hazards with the same rigour as physical ones, involving workers, and building controls into how work is designed. It sits comfortably alongside the HSE’s 6 Management Standards: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.
If you’ve never looked at either, our plain-English guide to stress risk assessments is a good place to start.
Beyond compliance.
A working risk assessment is the legal floor. It deals with how the work is designed. The other half is the state people are in when they meet that work. Teams that can regulate under pressure recover faster, think more clearly and raise problems earlier, which is exactly the kind of upstream culture the HSE wants to see.
Breath is the most practical starting point we know. It’s simple, trainable and can be built into the working day across a whole organisation.
This is part of a series on the hidden cost of dysregulation. Start with presenteeism.
The Working Well assessment shows you where your organisation sits and what dysregulation is likely costing you. Your Working Well briefing, with the full cost model, follows by email.
Take the Working Well assessment today. workerbe.co.uk/working-well
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