Non-disclosure Agreements

Clive Betts Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Speeches should be about seven minutes; that is guidance, not an absolute limit. I remind Members not to refer to any cases that are active before the courts, because they are sub judice.

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[Martin Wrigley]

I fully agree. Absolutely—people do not know what they can do.

Will the Minister investigate how widespread the use of NDAs is in the NHS? Given that it is probably in the Government’s power to ban it in the NHS without primary legislation, will he take steps immediately to have it stopped and seek what recompense is required for those who have suffered it?

I agree absolutely that this practice must be stopped entirely. It is just one of many poor practices that are carried out by some businesses—not all, but some—often unwittingly. That is why I introduced my Company Directors (Duties) Bill, which will have its Second Reading debate on 4 July. Right now, the company directors’ duties say that they must put shareholder interests first and might have regard to other things. My Bill—I hope the Minister will consider working with me on making it happen—would change company law so that directors have a duty to balance the interests of shareholders, employees and the environment. I seek the support of Members present to make the Bill law; I hope that we can have further discussions to see what we can do to get it into the Government’s schedule. Until we put that balance at the foundation of the company directors’ duties, it will be impossible to get rid of circumstances, such as those the hon. Member for Congleton described, where company directors behave badly.

I fully support the right hon. Member for Sheffield Heeley on all the issues that she identified and will happily engage and do whatever I can to advance work on them.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

The Front-Bench speeches will need to start by 10.28 am. I call the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee.

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

I certainly will not take that long—that would not make me very popular at all.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair today, Mr Betts, and to follow such informative and heartfelt speeches. I wish that there were more people here, because I have learned something new from every single speaker—those who spoke because this issue matters to them and those, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Mrs Russell), who have huge experience in this area. It is well worth sharing the information that we have heard with colleagues, so that it does not stay within these four walls.

There will probably be some bad-faith actors out there who will want to read what we say as a desire to ban NDAs altogether and not protect commercially sensitive information. That is absolutely not what my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Heeley (Louise Haigh), or any of the other campaigners who have worked hard on this issue, have laid out. Our intention is purely to stop the abuse, discrimination, bullying and sexual harassment that we have heard about. I praise my right hon. Friend for seeking to include a measure on this subject in the Employment Rights Bill, and the Minister for saying that they will work on an issue on which we have not seen progress, despite the existence of quite a lot of cross-party consensus.

We have heard about the high-profile cases, and we know that women are five times more likely to have signed an NDA than men, but the problem is not just the scale; it is that victims of discrimination or sexual harassment are asked to sign NDAs at their most vulnerable moment. Pregnant Then Screwed estimated that around 435,000 pregnant women and mothers in the UK have signed NDAs, and 80% of those felt they had to either leave their job or cut their hours as a result of the NDA. Those are shocking statistics. Surely, that goes against the Government’s aim to ensure that people get work, get the jobs they want, and stay in work and progress. This is not just about injustice; it is also about the growth agenda.

We do not know the true scale of the issue. I am grateful that Can’t Buy My Silence, Pregnant Then Screwed and other organisations are working on estimates, but we should not be working on estimates; we should know the full scale of what is happening throughout our economy. I do not know how many people are subjected to NDAs in Luton North. I really should. We all should, and we should know which employers are abusing the system.

Why do people sign NDAs, and why are they predominantly women? It is because of the huge power imbalance. We have heard about the low pay, and the lack of justice and of access to justice. They often feel that it is their only option and their only way out. They think, “If I don’t take this, what else am I going to get?” The big CEO of a corporation is not going to get taken down by the cleaner. That just does not happen; it only happens in films. That is because our justice system is not balanced or fair, and people feel that the oppression of workers is just part of the cost of doing business.

An NDA not only leaves the victim without a sense of justice, but protects a culture of wrongdoing. Not only does it protect the wrongdoer every step of the way, but, a large chunk of the time, they actually fail up. I have heard about instances of sexual harassment in the workplace in which the woman has to sign an NDA and leave, while the man gets to stay—in fact, not only does he stay, but he is either moved aside to a different department or promoted to gain more power and access. That is happening in all parts of our economy, in every workplace. We saw it at Harrods, and we have just seen it at Primark. It is really downplayed. I think that NDAs are used to downplay the severity of what they are truly hiding. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, people hide disgusting behaviour behind NDAs.

The boss of Primark has just resigned for what he called an “error of judgment” with regard to his behaviour towards a woman. An “error of judgment” is when I decide to dress for winter but it is really hot outside; it is not something that a CEO has to resign for because of his behaviour towards a woman. It is not just about protecting the victim; it is also about how we improve the culture in business and in our economy. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Heeley said, this does not just happen in one sector; it happens in charities, in finance and, unfortunately, in trade unions. We have heard about it at the Women and Equalities Committee.

I plead with the Minister to not forget self-employed workers. Whatever changes we make—and I hope that we make progress—we must consider the vulnerability of self-employed workers. The Committee heard that loud and clear in the evidence we received on our misogyny in music inquiry. We heard from brave witnesses, including Charisse Beaumont, Lucy Cox and Celeste. Dr Beaumont, who is the CEO of Black Lives in Music, said:

“We have hundreds of stories from women of being harassed including sexually assaulted by male artists as well as promoters, people assaulting women in music education, participating in almost naked casting videos, young women pressured to drink and take drugs, who are then assaulted, male producers grooming young female vocalists.”

She added:

“It’s rife in all genres, particularly classical music.”

I want to pay tribute to one of the very brave female artists who did speak out. She came from the classical music industry, and she spoke at our Select Committee. I really do recommend reading her testimony. She spoke about the horrendous behaviour of some of the conductors towards female classical musicians, the sexual favours that those women were asked for in order to get the first positions, and the fact that one conductor had said, “Well, if you want to be in the first chair, you’re going to have to wait until someone dies or gets pregnant.” In the classical music industry, they equated pregnancy with death. I want to say how difficult it was, and how hard my Clerks had to work, to find women who were prepared to speak out against the misogyny and sexual harassment that they had faced in the music industry.

The last Tory Government agreed that there was a problem with misogyny in music but rejected every one of the Committee’s recommendations. I ask this Government to do better. One of those recommendations was about banning NDAs. The general secretary of the Musicians’ Union, Naomi Pohl, has called for a ban on NDAs that prohibit the disclosure of sexual harassment, discrimination or bullying. Some 51% of women report experiencing gender discrimination in music, and 32% of them have been sexually harassed while working as a musician. That proportion increases if the woman is from a global majority—black, Asian or minority ethnic—background, disabled or LGBT+.

Lawyers are probably getting quite excited by the thought of what alternatives there might be to NDAs, so I say to the Minister that we need to be innovative. We need to be ahead of the curve and of all the bad-faith actors. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Heeley is right: we should not be falling behind as a country; we should be leading the way. Minister, the evidence is there—let us get to it.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I thank everyone for their co-operation. We now move on to the Front-Bench spokespeople, each of whom has, as a guide, around 10 minutes, but we clearly have more time than that if people want to take it.

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[Josh Babarinde]

I would love to study that particular dimension. We must defend the rights of pregnant women and new mums, who have been so let down by our legislative framework, including the individual I am asking hon. Members to imagine. She went through mediation, where it was agreed that she would receive a severance payment in exchange for signing an agreement that included a gagging clause. She said:

“The net effect was that I was unemployed and, whilst I was financially compensated, I was unable to explain to future employers why I had left that employment and why it wasn’t my choice to do so.”

That is exactly the point that the hon. Member for Congleton (Mrs Russell) made. By the way, I really feel that her contribution to this debate has been kick-ass—I am not sure that that that is a parliamentary term, but I am sure that hon. Members agree. Further, this new mum said:

“I felt I was the party in the right and yet I was the one who had the uncertainty and stress of being unemployed and having to job hunt with a 9 month old baby.”

There is no need to imagine such a scenario because it is a true story. The only reason I cannot name the individual or the employer is that, although we might be protected by parliamentary privilege in this place, the lady whose circumstances I just described is not.

This is the reality faced by countless individuals across the country, right under our noses, and it is an injustice that cannot be tolerated. We as Members of Parliament have to act decisively to end this moral and regulatory failing. First, and no two ways about it, NDAs should be outlawed in cases of sexual misconduct, harassment and bullying, to ensure that no victim is silenced, no victim is prevented from seeking justice and no police or regulatory investigation is obstructed. We have already seen encouraging steps in the legal and academic sectors to ban the use of NDAs in such cases. We heard a bit about those from the right hon. Member for Sheffield Heeley, but these piecemeal efforts are not enough.

We need comprehensive legislation, and there is precedent for that in other jurisdictions, as has been touched on already. In Prince Edward Island in Canada, new legislation restricts the use and content of NDAs in cases of sexual harassment and discrimination in all out-of-court settlements where a survivor does not want it. In the USA, the Speak Out Act was passed in 2022 prohibiting non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses agreed to before a dispute that involves sexual misconduct. Last month, Ireland became the first jurisdiction in the world to legislate country-wide against the misuse of NDAs. In the light of that, the efforts of the right hon. Member for Sheffield Heeley in her amendment are extremely laudable, as are the similar efforts of my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran). That is the first thing we must do: outlaw NDAs in such circumstances.

Secondly, we must ensure that individuals who sign NDAs outside those circumstances but under duress or intimidation have a clear and legal route to challenge them. Too often, victims sign these agreements without fully understanding their rights or the full extent of the implications. They end up, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, tied up in knots in their endeavour. I have heard from a man in this scenario who said,

“I had no resilience left to fight an investigation nor a tribunal so I accepted.”

On the powerful point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), we must guarantee that legal advice is readily available, independent and free from conflicts of interest for people in these scenarios, so that no one feels coerced into silence by a document they barely understand.

Thirdly, we must foster a cultural shift in public and private organisations so that they no longer view NDAs as a convenient tool to shield themselves from scrutiny, and we can move away from the culture of fear, which the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), who is no longer in her place, referred to. Employers must be held accountable not only for misconduct that occurs on their watch, but for any attempt to cover it up. Transparency should be the norm, not the exception.

Finally, we must support victims and survivors in speaking out. That means strengthening whistleblower protections, including through establishing a dedicated office of the whistleblower, which the Liberal Democrats advocated for in our manifesto, alongside organisations such as WhistleblowersUK. There is a particular whistle- blower in my constituency who I will not name, but she knows who she is. She is campaigning hard on this front as well.

Silence benefits only those who perpetrate harm. Our role must be to amplify the voices of those who have been silenced for too long. This debate, while ostensibly technical and legalistic, gets to the core of what kind of society we want to be. Do we want to be a society in which institutions prioritise their reputations over human dignity, and victims are forced into silence while abusers continue unchecked, or do we want a society in which justice prevails, transparency is valued and every individual regardless of their status or power can be held accountable for their actions? I know which society I want to live in, and I think that all of us in this Chamber today are on the same page—in fact, I am confident of that. Liberal Democrats look forward to working with the Government on a cross-party basis to stamp out this insidious practice once and for all. We look forward also to hearing what steps the Minister will take to make that a reality.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I now call the spokesman for the official Opposition.

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[Greg Smith]

I do not particularly want to relitigate our debate in the main Chamber a few weeks ago. It is the job of the Opposition to kick the tyres on legislation that the Government put forward, and that is what did in that debate. I hope the hon. Lady turns out to be right, but the Employment Rights Bill is still a Bill, and when it undoubtedly becomes an Act due to the parliamentary arithmetic at the moment, we will be able to fully test that and see who is right.

I want to focus on the importance of the issue before us today. His Majesty’s loyal Opposition echo the question that Members have asked the Minister this morning: when can we expect legislation to be brought forward to tackle this issue? Will it be stand-alone, or will the Government amend the existing vehicle available to them in the House of Lords?

We also need to ensure that the Government’s own house is in order on this front. I gently ask the Minister for transparency on the Government’s own use of NDAs. How many non-disclosure agreements have been used across the civil service since the Government took office last July? Do the Government rely on these agreements to settle disputes within their own Departments? If the Government believe, as I hope they do, that NDAs should not be misused—and misused is a light term for this—they must lead by example.

I do not believe that this is about party politics; it is about ensuring fairness and justice in our workplaces. We must end the practice of silencing victims and start fostering a culture where wrongdoing is exposed and addressed. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and, more importantly, seeing the meaningful action that every Member who has spoken in this debate this morning wants to see come to pass.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I call the Minister. I would appreciate it if he could leave two minutes at the end for the mover to wind up.