Brighton’s employment mix is unusual. A high proportion of small creative businesses, a large hospitality and tourism sector with seasonal peaks, a substantial freelance population and two universities produce a workforce where a lot of people are either self-employed or working for organisations too small to have an HR department.
That matters, because most workplace health rights are the same regardless of employer size, and most people working for small employers do not know what they are.
Stress Is a Health and Safety Issue, Not a Personal One
The starting point surprises people. Work-related stress is not a wellbeing nicety in UK law. It is a hazard employers must assess.
The Health and Safety Executive’s guidance on work-related stress and how to manage it states that employers have a legal duty to protect workers from stress at work by carrying out a risk assessment and acting on it, the same duty they have for any other health and safety risk. HSE defines stress as the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other demands placed on them.
The duty sits under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, and it applies to employers of any size.
The scale is not trivial. HSE statistics for 2023/24 recorded 776,000 workers reporting work-related stress, depression or anxiety, accounting for nearly half of all self-reported work-related ill health and an estimated 16.4 million working days lost.
The Management Standards Are the Practical Test
HSE publishes Management Standards covering six areas of work design that influence stress: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.
Employers are not obliged to use them, but if stress is an issue in a workplace, they must be able to demonstrate policies and practices that control and mitigate it. The Standards are the benchmark inspectors apply.
For an employee, that is useful leverage. Raising a concern about workload framed as a health and safety matter carries different weight from raising it as a complaint about being busy, and it is not a rhetorical trick. It is the correct legal characterisation.
Disability, Disclosure and Adjustments
The second area people misunderstand is reasonable adjustments.
Under the Equality Act 2010, a person is disabled if they have a physical or mental impairment with a substantial and long-term adverse effect on their ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. That definition is broader than most people assume and covers many long-term conditions that nobody would describe as a disability in ordinary conversation.
Where a disabled worker is placed at a substantial disadvantage, the employer has a duty to make reasonable adjustments. The catch is that the duty is triggered by knowledge: an employer is not required to adjust for something it does not know about and could not reasonably be expected to know about.
That creates a real dilemma, and the answer depends on your circumstances rather than on a general rule.
Medication and What You Do and Do Not Have to Say
A narrower question arises around prescribed medicines, and it comes up more than employers admit.
There is no general obligation to volunteer your medical history. The position changes where a role carries specific health requirements, where drug testing is contractual, or where you are asking for adjustments.
Guidance on medical cannabis employment works through the practical considerations for one particular treatment, and the general principle transfers to any prescribed medicine that might show on a test. A workplace drug policy will not necessarily distinguish between prescribed and unprescribed use unless someone tells it to, and that conversation is considerably easier before a test than after one.
This is general information rather than legal or medical advice, and anyone in a live situation should take advice on their specific circumstances.
Where Private Healthcare Comes In
Waiting times mean some employees pursue private routes for diagnosis or treatment, and it is worth understanding what that does and does not change.
It does not alter your employment rights, and a private diagnosis carries the same weight as an NHS one for the purposes of the Equality Act. It may get you a diagnosis faster, which in turn may unlock adjustments sooner.
Whether the route is physiotherapy, mental health support or a specialist service such as a medical cannabis clinic, the treatment decision belongs with a qualified clinician. The employment question is separate, and worth thinking about before rather than after treatment starts.
The Seasonal and Freelance Gap
Brighton’s hospitality and events sectors run on seasonal and variable-hours contracts, and workers on those contracts frequently assume they have fewer rights than they do.
Health and safety duties apply to workers regardless of contract type. So does the duty around stress. Agency workers are covered, and so are zero-hours workers.
Genuinely self-employed people are the real gap. If you work for yourself, nobody is assessing your workload, nobody is obliged to make adjustments, and sick pay does not exist. That is worth planning around rather than discovering during an illness.
What Actually Helps in a Small Business
Most Brighton employers are small enough that the relationship with a manager matters more than any policy.
Raise things early and specifically. “I have too much on” is easy to dismiss; “these three deadlines fall in the same week and I cannot meet all of them” is actionable.
Ask for adjustments in writing, even informally by email, because a record exists afterwards.
And use the free routes before the expensive ones. Acas provides free advice on employment rights, and its helpline is available to employees as well as employers.
Three Things Worth Doing This Month
Find out whether your employer has a stress risk assessment, since a surprising number do not and asking is itself a prompt.
If you have a long-term condition, decide deliberately whether to disclose rather than defaulting to silence, and understand that adjustments cannot be required from an employer who does not know.
And if you are self-employed, check what happens to your income if you cannot work for a month. That is the single largest unmanaged risk in Brighton’s freelance economy.
