Office of the Whistleblower Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I too fully support the Bill and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer. Noble Lords who have spoken have given many examples of whistleblowing, but the one that has not so far been mentioned is of course the Post Office postmasters. They have suffered as much as anyone, and the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, has been pursuing their cause for years. It is one example where the people in charge get promotions while the people who have suffered lose their careers and pensions, have to spend sometimes millions on fighting, and have family breakdowns and even one or two suicides.

I want to speak briefly about HS2 whistleblowers—yet another case that is sadly still ongoing. People do not whistleblow just for fun. Often they do it because they sincerely believe that what is being done by their bosses, colleagues, government or others is professionally, ethically or morally wrong, as my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti has just told us. One example briefly referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, is a friend of mine, Douglas Thornton, a highly qualified professional property and land valuer who was commissioned by HS2 to value all the properties that it would have to buy. He and his colleagues very professionally produced a schedule of everything, which unfortunately showed that HS2’s budget was about half what it should have been.

Rather than the management accepting this, they sacked them and kicked them out of the office, and this is still a problem today because there is not enough money to buy the land or the properties. It is part of the reason why the cost estimates for HS2 are still in the clouds, frankly, with no real back-up or anything else. I have lots of evidence, because Ministers over the years, the Permanent Secretaries and the chief executives of HS2 have either told what I would call lies or misled Parliament by hiding that they knew the true costs. One HS2 employee actually gave evidence to a Select Committee, saying, “If we told Parliament the true cost, they would never give approval.” Where is Parliament on this, keeping an eye on it?

This Bill provides the opportunity to provide much more support for whistleblowers. It needs independence, power, finance and, most of all, the strongest political support by Parliament against an overpowering Administration.