Location: Southwark, London
Sector: Retail
Reason for Surveillance: Verifying Sickness and Absence Claims
Background
The HR director of a mid-sized retail chain headquartered in Southwark contacted us regarding an employee who had been on long-term sickness absence for approaching seven months, citing a chronic back injury that the employee’s own occupational health assessments described as preventing any form of manual work or prolonged standing. The company had continued to pay contractual sick pay throughout, but had grown suspicious after a store manager reported seeing the employee — by chance, at a weekend market — apparently carrying heavy boxes without any evident discomfort.
This is one of the more delicate categories of work we undertake, because genuine long-term sickness is common and deserves to be treated with compassion, not suspicion. The client was clear that they had no wish to harass a genuinely unwell employee, but equally could not continue indefinite full sick pay on the strength of a single, second-hand observation without a proper basis for either confirming or ruling out their concerns.
Before agreeing to take the instruction, our corporate investigators asked the HR director a series of questions we always put to clients in absence cases: had the employee’s own GP or occupational health assessments been kept up to date, was there a specific, credible trigger beyond a single sighting, and had the company considered whether a welfare check-in, rather than surveillance, might be the more appropriate first step. In this instance, the combination of a specific, repeated pattern reported by a manager and the length of time full sick pay had already been paid persuaded me that a proportionate, time-limited period of observation was justified, provided it was scoped tightly and conducted to a high evidential standard.
The Brief
We were instructed to conduct a period of proportionate, targeted surveillance to establish whether the employee’s day-to-day physical activity was consistent with the medical restrictions described in their occupational health reports. The brief was time-limited and specific: observe and record, do not approach or engage, and confine observation strictly to public places where the individual had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
The Investigation
We conducted observation across six non-consecutive days over a three-week period, deliberately spaced to capture a representative picture of the employee’s activity levels rather than a single unrepresentative day. Observation was limited to public locations — the employee’s regular travel routes, a local gym car park, and the weekend market referenced in the original report — and at no point did surveillance extend to private property or areas where privacy could reasonably be expected.
Over the course of the observation period, we recorded the employee engaging in a range of physical activity that appeared materially inconsistent with the restrictions described in their medical certification: carrying and lifting boxes of stock at a market stall on three separate occasions, each for periods exceeding twenty minutes, and on one occasion, assisting with the physical assembly of a market gazebo requiring sustained overhead lifting.
Throughout, we were mindful that surveillance of this kind carries real reputational and legal risk if handled poorly, so every observation session was logged contemporaneously, with timestamps, weather conditions, and the observer’s exact vantage point recorded alongside the footage itself, in line with the evidential standards we would apply to any covert observation likely to be relied upon in a later legal or disciplinary process. We deliberately avoided any observation of the employee’s home address beyond confirming departure and return from a public street, and at no point did we attempt to engage the employee directly or use any pretext to elicit information, both of which would have crossed from lawful, proportionate observation into something considerably more legally exposed.
We also reviewed, at the client’s request, whether the employee’s role could reasonably be adapted to accommodate genuine restrictions, in case the observed activity turned out to have an innocent explanation — for example, a good day within a fluctuating condition. This is an important discipline in absence cases: the investigation should be capable of either confirming or dispelling suspicion, not simply built to justify a decision management has already reached.
Findings
The video evidence, combined with a detailed observation log, showed a clear and repeated pattern of physical activity difficult to reconcile with a condition preventing manual work. We were careful in our reporting not to offer any medical opinion — that is not our role, and it would have undermined the credibility of the report — but simply to document, factually and without embellishment, what was observed, when, and for how long.
Outcome
The client shared our report, alongside the employee’s own occupational health assessments, with an independent occupational health physician for professional comment. The physician’s own review concluded that the observed activity was inconsistent with the reported condition. The employee was invited to a formal capability meeting, at which point they admitted to running a market stall as a side business and accepted that their sickness certification did not reflect their actual level of activity. The matter was resolved through a negotiated exit agreement rather than proceeding to a full disciplinary and dismissal process.
Lessons for Other Businesses
Sickness absence surveillance is an area where proportionality is not just good practice, it is a legal necessity. Employers should never commission this kind of work on a hunch alone; there needs to be a credible, documented trigger, a defined and time-limited scope, and observation strictly confined to public spaces. Done properly, it protects genuinely unwell employees from unfounded suspicion just as much as it protects employers from abuse of sick pay schemes — because in most cases, this kind of investigation actually confirms that an absence is genuine.
Investigator’s Reflection
It is worth being honest about the fact that most sickness absence surveillance instructions we receive conclude with no adverse finding at all — the employee is exactly as unwell as they say, and the observation simply confirms that, allowing the employer to stand down its concerns and support the employee’s return to work with confidence rather than suspicion hanging over the relationship. This case was one of the minority where the evidence pointed the other way, and even then, we were glad the client chose a negotiated exit over an adversarial dismissal process; the underlying dishonesty was serious, but a proportionate resolution served everyone better than a protracted disciplinary battle.
