The Six-Month Bad Back

Updated 5 October 2026 by Investigation Bureau

An illustrative case story. It is a composite built from the kind of work our investigators have handled over the years. Names, places, dates and identifying details have been changed or merged so that nobody can be identified. The methods and the ethics are as described.

The operations director of a family-owned food wholesaler came to us about a despatch supervisor who had been off sick for six months with a back injury. The statutory process had been followed to the letter: fit notes on time, occupational health reviews attended (on a crutch), and enhanced sick pay paid throughout, as company policy required.

The trouble was the talk. Two employees, separately and carefully, had mentioned that the supervisor was "doing gardens". A manager's sister-in-law was certain she had seen him carrying fence panels. HR pointed out, quite rightly, that rumour and a sister-in-law are not grounds for dismissal, and that acting on them would hand him an unfair dismissal claim ready-made. This is exactly the gap that professional surveillance exists to close. HR cannot follow a person around and should not try. But an evidenced fact is something HR can act on.

Proportionate by design

Workplace surveillance has to clear a higher bar than most. It must be proportionate. It must rest on real grounds, which here were the two employee reports, written down. And it must answer one specific question, not trawl through a man's life. We scoped it that way in the first conversation: up to three non-consecutive days of observation, in public places only, concerned solely with whether his activity was consistent with the incapacity he had declared. The quote was fixed and agreed in writing before any work began. The client said afterwards that it came to less than five weeks of the sick pay in question. (Typical UK pricing is set out in our cost guide.)

Day one was uneventful, as first days often are. A school run, a trip to the chemist, home. He walked without the crutch, which was noted and timestamped. But nobody loses a job over a trip to the shops, and nobody should.

Day two was a Wednesday. Our investigator logged him leaving home at 7.15am in work boots and driving a pickup to a house on the other side of town. He spent the morning there with another man, taking down an old fence and putting up a new one: posts, bags of ballast, and the very panels the sister-in-law had described. Close to two hours of it went onto timestamped video, filmed from the public road. The pickup also featured in an advert on a local online marketplace, placed under his middle name: "fencing and garden clearance, no job too small."

Day three showed that it was a business and not a favour for a friend. A different address, the same pickup, a full day's work, and cash plainly handed over at the end of it. We stood down. Three days had been authorised. Two and a half had answered the question beyond argument.

What the client did with it

The evidence pack went to the client's employment solicitor before anyone else saw it: the video, stills, an observation log accurate to the minute, and the online advert, captured and preserved with its metadata. Faced with it at a disciplinary hearing, the supervisor resigned before the process had finished. No tribunal claim followed, because there was nothing to build one on. The company tightened the triggers for its absence reviews and, on its solicitor's suggestion, quietly recovered part of the enhanced sick pay.

The director's last remark sums the case up. "I was never hoping to catch him. I just wanted to be able to stop guessing." That is what a workplace investigation is really for: not catching people out, but replacing a rumour nobody can manage with a fact somebody can. Sometimes the fact clears the employee completely. Those reports are shorter, and everyone sleeps better.

Managing a suspicion you cannot act on? Read how workplace investigations and covert surveillance work, or talk it through in confidence with an investigator.

Related reading: Workplace · Covert surveillance · Private investigator cost uk