AWARDED £67,000 by a court after claiming she was brought to the brink of a nervous breakdown by the pressure of her 18-hour week as a council housing officer, Midlands mother-of-two Beverley Lancaster makes legal history as the first person to get an employer to admit liability in court for causing stress to a member of staff.

But more than this, Mrs Lancaster's case opens the gates to a flood of similar claims from workers claiming stress in their job has made them sick.

Indeed, her trade union says it has another 7,000 such cases on its books.

Yet why - even in our society's ever-expanding compensation culture which frequently sees victims of horrendous injury inflicted by criminals recompensed far less than Mrs Lancaster has been by a civil court for her inability to cope with sometimes-stroppy council tenants - should an automatic pathway to bumper pay-outs be delineated by this case?

To begin with, it is far from established that workplace stress is always harmful.

Some might actually argue that it is a useful, necessary element in the world of work - both for the employee and the health of the business - and that people are actually rewarded with their wages for the experience of it. There is, of course, a world of difference between the stressed employee who is motivated by the pressure of work and by the work ethic itself - and are not both essential factors in a successful enterprise culture and economy upon which the whole of society depends? - and the unfairly, put-upon worker who is given too much to do in too little time or is piled with tasks beyond his or her capabilities.

But was this distinction ever tested in this case?

Hardly.

As might be expected of a local authority which passes the bill for compensation on to the public, Mrs Lancaster's employers chose to concede her claim rather than contest it.

We look forward, then, to future claimants having to go the whole course.

In this way the notion that stress at work is harmful will be wholly and forensically tested by the courts.

It will also mean that our already-bloated compensation culture is not added to by hordes of opportunistic whingers encouraged by this case to believe there is now a charter for them to hit the jackpot every time.

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