Lord Wills
Main Page: Lord Wills (Labour - Life peer)Enterprise Bill [HL]
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Lord Wills (Lab)
My Lords, I support the amendments, which have been so persuasively argued for by the noble Lord, Lord Low. I want to speak particularly to Amendments 70AA and 73B, to which I have added my name.
It is clearly right that there should be rigorous controls on the use of taxpayers’ money for exit payments, but the Minister will be aware of widespread concerns across the House about unintended consequences of this legislation in discouraging whistleblowers and the resulting potentially damaging impact on public services. We have discussed this issue many times in your Lordships’ House, and I do not want to rehearse at great length arguments on the merits of whistleblowers, save to say that I support what the noble Lord, Lord Low, has just said. We have seen the value of whistleblowing in both the public sector and the private sector over and again—Volkswagen might have been very well served by a whistleblower some years ago, which might have saved it and millions of motorists great grief. We have seen the advantages of whistleblowing in the National Health Service and throughout the public sector. I hope that the Minister will agree that it is very important that, in moving forward with this legislation, which broadly I welcome, that there are not unintended consequences of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Low, has just described in discouraging genuine whistleblowers from coming forward.
We have heard already that this legislation, which applies a uniform cap of £95,000 across all settlement agreements for employment disputes, does not take into account the uncapped damages that can be awarded for very good reasons under the Public Interest Disclosure Act. It is common ground that the public interest is best served by creating an environment which encourages genuine whistleblowers to come forward with their information and to do so in a timely way. Such whistleblowers usually take considerable personal risks in doing so and many of them do not work again in their chosen industry or profession after making a public interest disclosure. It is crucial that there is robust legal protection for such courageous individuals. Uncapped damages at employment tribunals are an important part of such protection—for example, encouraging those with high earnings in professions which are often of great public concern to come forward. It is important that such people do so, as they often possess potentially the most important information.
In view of the Government’s frequently stated concerns to protect whistleblowers, it is hard to believe that they intended the cap in this Bill to damage these public policy aims, but that could still happen. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, has just set out, a blanket cap might encourage the parties to be less flexible in their negotiations, to be more aggressive and litigious. At the very least, there is potential for confusion, given that the level of the cap in this legislation does not match the current employment protection legislation, in particular claims under the Public Interest Disclosure Act.
The Minister has suggested that the Government will deal with this issue by the Treasury issuing guidance, which—I quote from the noble Baroness’s letter to the noble Lord, Lord Low, of 17 November—will,
“make clear that where payments relating to potential whistleblowing claims are correct then the power to exempt exit payments could be exercised”.
It is not clear what this might mean in practice. For example, what does “correct” mean? What is the significance of the words suggesting that the power “could be exercised” instead of “would be exercised”? It is important that the Minister clarifies the position on this as the Government have a propensity, despite all their fine words, for incoherence in the way that they provide adequate protection for whistleblowers.
The Minister may recall, for example, our exchanges during the passage of the small business Bill about extending whistleblowing protection towards job applicants. The Government eventually recognised the need to do this for NHS workers as a result of the Francis report—this was most welcome—but they then refused to implement such protections for anyone else. Then the Government produced no reason why such protection should not be available to workers in, for example, social care, the City of London or the construction industry, where informal blacklisting is just as likely and the public interest in disclosure is potentially just as important as in the NHS.
At the time the Minister claimed,
“there is work to be done to get this right and it will take time, beyond this Parliament, to reach a suitable solution”.—[Official Report, 26/1/15; col. GC 10.]
Time has passed and there is a new Parliament, so will the Minister take this opportunity to reassure your Lordships’ House that the Government have been addressing this anomaly? If they have not done anything yet, can she reassure me that she will at least ask one of her officials—assuming that there are any left after the Autumn Statement—to consult about how best to address this anomaly, including potentially talking to the whistleblowing charity, Public Concern at Work, and write to me at some point—say, before the Summer Recess—about the progress she has made?
As we have heard, Amendment 73B contains provision to tackle continuing concerns about so-called gagging clauses and the need to ensure that, if a whistleblower and an employer enter into negotiations to end the employment relationship, any unresolved or outstanding public interest concerns at the centre of the dispute are passed on to a relevant regulator or law enforcement body. As noble Lords are aware, the Public Interest Disclosure Act provides a defence against gagging practices by making any clause in an agreement void if it would prevent a protected disclosure being made. This means that an employer would not be able to rely on a confidentiality clause within the settlement agreement either to prevent a relevant concern being raised by a whistleblower or to threaten monetary penalties for a breach of a provision in the settlement agreement. The Government have in the past relied on this to resist previous attempts to tackle these so-called gagging clauses. However, the law is not the problem; the problem is the evidence of a widespread perception that confidentiality clauses contained within settlement agreements gag individuals from escalating their concerns with a regulatory or law enforcement body.
The National Audit Office researched public sector whistleblowing settlement agreements and looked at 50 agreements. It concluded that none of them would breach the Public Interest Disclosure Act but, when it interviewed the whistleblowers who were party to those agreements, it found that they were under the impression that they were so gagged by the agreement. This is due to the opaque wording of many of the confidentiality clauses within the settlement agreements considered in the research.
The amendment deals with this problem in two ways: first, through ensuring that a worker in this difficult situation has access to legal advice so that they are fully aware of the defence provided by the law and so preventing the erroneous perception to take hold that these individuals are gagged when they sign a settlement agreement. The second part of the solution is to create a referral system within regulations relating to the cap to ensure that incidents of wrongdoing, malpractice or health and safety danger are sent to the relevant regulatory body so that the signing of a settlement agreement does not prevent the concerns being raised and the public interest being pursued.
These amendments represent an opportunity for the Minister to reassure the public that the Government are determined to do everything possible to protect and encourage genuine whistleblowers by removing the confusion and incoherence that this legislation risks creating and by tackling a long-established obstacle to the transparency that is so critical to the effective and safe delivery of public services. I hope the Minister will seize this opportunity with enthusiasm and accept the amendments; or, at the very least, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, agree to meet him, me and my noble friend Lady Hayter to discuss a possible coming together of minds on this before Third Reading. I certainly would not wish to press this to a vote either.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Low and Lord Wills, for their careful scrutiny and for these amendments. I say from the outset that this clause is not intended to disincentivise employers from entering into appropriate settlement agreements, nor is it intended to limit the payments that are available to aggrieved individuals in whistleblowing or discrimination claims.
I agree with the points around the importance of these matters made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham. However, I repeat the point I made in my letter to the noble Lord, Lord Low, that there is an important difference between payments that have been directed by a tribunal and payments made under a settlement agreement. If a claim is successfully brought to tribunal, there is a clear finding of fault. I make clear today that payments directed by a court or any tribunal will not be within the scope of the cap. The draft regulations will be specific on that point, and we do not need to put it into the Bill.
However, in the case of a settlement agreement, this is of course only a potential claim and we will not know whether it in fact has merit. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, has said, guidance on relaxing the cap will clarify that these are the kinds of circumstances in which it may sometimes be appropriate to make settlement payments above the level of the cap. The Treasury guidance on relaxation of the cap will make it clear that such payments should be made only after appropriate scrutiny. Otherwise, if we were to exempt certain categories of claim from the cap as proposed in the amendment, we would actually create a loophole that could encourage some people to make unmeritorious claims in order to avoid the effect of the cap. This could lead to payments in excess of the cap being made in cases where that is clearly not appropriate. I stand by the point. I have said that the draft regulations will exclude all tribunal-directed payments from the scope of the cap.
We have no desire to encourage claims to proceed to tribunal where settlement is more appropriate. It seems to me that, if some types of settlement on the grounds of whistleblowing or under the Equality Act were excluded, that would complicate employment law proceedings in just the way that the noble Lord, Lord Low, described. I fear that, if we were to proceed as proposed, we might discredit genuine claims by whistleblowers and of unlawful discrimination by association with a legal loophole, so our clauses include such payments within the scope of the cap but allow for the restrictions to be relaxed in appropriate cases.
Amendment 70AA raises the important topic of whistleblowing. The Government take this issue extremely seriously.
Lord Wills
I appreciate that the issue cannot be given greater clarity at the moment, but if she can, will the Minister say a little more about how she would describe “appropriate cases” and who will be the judge of those?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
Perhaps I may pick that up at the end and deal now with the point on whistleblowing, which we take very seriously.
People who take the bold step of disclosing malpractice in the public interest play an important role in bringing wrongdoing to light. It is essential that they are protected from suffering detriment at the hands of their employers. As the noble Lord, Lord Wills, said, they often take considerable personal risk. The legal framework to protect whistleblowers has been substantially strengthened over the past year, partly due to the great work of the noble Lord and of the charity Public Concern at Work. I am sure I speak on behalf of many in the House when I say how grateful I am for those efforts.
Amendment 73B also concerns whistleblowing and has three components. The key point is that a settlement agreement cannot prevent an employee making a public interest disclosure. The Employment Rights Act 1996 provides that any agreement that seeks to do so will be void, so a whistleblower signing a settlement agreement remains completely free to report the wrongdoing to the relevant body. The issue can be properly investigated without the need for a regulatory referral system as proposed in the amendment.
The time is late. I am entirely happy to meet noble Lords, along with officials from the Treasury and BIS, to talk about some of the points raised, including, for example, an update on the progress of the Francis report changes, although I think they need to settle in, as I indicated earlier. On the point about “appropriate cases”, this is an important issue for the guidance and we will consult on it in parallel with the draft secondary legislation next year. Noble Lords will have the opportunity to see it in advance of the regulations being considered.
That is the long way round of saying that the meeting that I have just accepted should take place should do so. However, I cannot accept the amendment. If the noble Lord wants to press it, he will have to test the opinion of the House but, as I say, I am happy to have a meeting to see whether we can take things forward, particularly on the guidance and the implementing regulations.