Office of the Whistleblower Bill [HL]

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I have no current relevant interest, but I speak as a former government lawyer and a long-serving director of Liberty. I have advised Ministers on breaches of, for example, official secrets and represented whistleblowers who have exposed serious wrongdoing in their workplaces at great personal cost and even greater risk.

I join the chorus of congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on her important and timely Bill. In the press just this morning Zelda Perkins, a former assistant to Harvey Weinstein, calls on Her Majesty’s Government to ratify ILO convention 190 on violence and harassment at work. I hope the Minister will take the opportunity while summing up to respond directly to her request.

However, there are many other forms of very bad practice which would justify public interest disclosure. Like other employment legislation, our whistleblowing laws lack sufficient accessibility and effective enforcement mechanisms, not least now that our civil legal aid system has been completely obliterated. On the one hand, organisations are entitled to expect a reasonable relationship of trust and confidence with their workforce and many others, as we have heard—even more so in the most sensitive areas—but on the other there is considerable public interest in serious bad practice up to and including illegality being exposed from within. How on earth can we expect vulnerable individuals to walk this ethical and legal minefield and face the dangers of discipline, dismissal, blacklisting and, in some cases, even prosecution without the kind of help that a body such as that proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, would offer? Every day we see new evidence that institutions—whether commercial, media or banking empires, government departments and even, tragically, as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, recently uncovered, the Metropolitan Police—simply cannot be trusted to police themselves. Their internal mechanisms for advising whistleblowers are, perhaps inevitably, wholly inadequate. The noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, proposes a way through. I hope that the Government are listening.