Whistleblowing at Work

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Monday 24th March 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Wills on initiating this debate. Contributing at the end, I find that the waterfront has been covered so well that I am almost tempted to say “ditto”. However, given my position as Front Bench spokesperson, I probably need to say a little more than that.

I went on to the website to look at the call for evidence and I noticed that it finished in November last year. However, I did not find a report. It may be that I missed it but perhaps the Minister could say whether any summary of the evidence has been published as yet. I can see a head shaking so it looks as though the answer is no. It has been quite a long while but no doubt we will be informed why. If the call for evidence finished in November, I would have thought that by now we would have had at least a summary, if not a complete report.

I concur with much of what my noble friend Lord Wills said. He made the point that the PIDA is now 15 years old. It may not be whiskery but given all the analysis we have heard today and the tributes we ought to be paying to Public Concern at Work—I was fascinated to learn that the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, was the instigator of that organisation—

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I am terribly sorry. I should not mislead your Lordships. I was only the mere lawyer who set the thing up; I was not the impetus for it.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green]

Okay. He played a significant role, we will say. It is not often that I dare to disagree with him, and his analysis is usually good, but when he said that if he had to make a choice between reform and enforcement he would go for enforcement, I did feel that that is not the advice we ought to be giving the Government. It is a 15 year-old piece of legislation and a very significant and comprehensive report—it ought not to be an either/or choice; it should surely be both. Reform is pointless without ensuring that we have adequate enforcement, as we have heard, with regard to all the difficulties that whistleblowers face.

I have to be careful how I comment on an issue that I was personally involved with recently as a school governor, when I saw what happened when somebody tried to deal with a difficult and sensitive issue. They were not exactly congratulated by all those concerned and it led to the individual feeling that they did not want to continue in their role as governor. The point has been made time and again: the pressures on people who try to blow the whistle are enormous.

I could not help but reflect on the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston. He listed a whole range of organisations, in construction, care homes, the BBC, the police—the list goes on and on. We have heard so much of this. It was actually the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, who mentioned the E-word—ethics, although I heard it only once. I am always fascinated when people talk about what goes on in MBA syllabuses and business schools and I am constantly reminding them of the importance of ensuring that ethics is a part of training.

Someone else—I think it was the noble Earl, Lord Lytton—talked about corporate social responsibility. It is there in every annual report. In theory, it is in companies’ own interests to encourage whistleblowing. If you think of the cost when organisations fail—whether it is health and safety or PPI, for example—the payouts are enormous. Companies ought to have a strong vested interest in ensuring that all their procedures are right but we know that, time and again, whether it is the hierarchical resistance referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, or the sheer fear whistleblowers feel about the reaction from their colleagues—whether it is higher up in the organisation or, as we saw in Mid Staffs, your own work colleagues—it takes a brave person to become a whistleblower. There is no guarantee that what you are doing, even if it is deemed to be in the public interest, means that you will be seen as a hero. The reverse can happen: not only can you lose your job but you can then fail to get employment elsewhere.

Without going through every single recommendation of the report—I do not think that I need to do that because so many of them have already been highlighted—there was one that I wanted to draw out, which was mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton: the question of whether workers who are wrongly identified as having made disclosures should be protected. I was interested in that because the Public Interest Disclosure Act says that the protection provided by the Act is not subject to any qualifying period of employment, so it is referred to as a “day one” right in employment law. Yet here, Public Concern at Work was saying, “Well, where the worker is wrongly identified as a whistleblower, there is a possibility that they will not get that ‘day one’ right to protection”. I hope that the Minister will be able to cover that in his response.

As regards all the points that have been made on regulation and being clear about what we mean by a worker—my noble friend Lord Wills was absolutely right when he gave us a long list of workers where it is doubtful whether they are necessarily included—I do not need to go through those again because they have already been adequately made. However, I look forward with interest to the Minister’s response, especially to the point I made about the call for evidence.