Protection for Whistleblowing Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I also fully support this Bill and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on her persistence in bringing forward her third attempt. I also pay tribute to all the people who supported her and the all-party group.

I will start by repeating the words of Mary Robinson MP, who said that

“if you name an industry, I can name … a scandal brought to light by whistleblowers”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/4/22; col. 598.]

That is a pretty wide generalisation. She went on to say that ignoring whistleblowers costs lives. Whistleblowers are proven over and again to be the first line of defence against crime, corruption and cover-up. They do not do it for fun, pretty obviously; they do it because they want to protect other people from the impact of wrongdoing. This is the Bill that they want, because it puts whistleblower issues front and centre and protects those who speak up from retaliation.

I will give a few examples. I expect that many noble Lords will have read the Reading the Signals report about the east Kent NHS trust last year and the hundreds of avoidable deaths and injuries to mothers and babies. It is a traumatic case and report, but it has also cost the NHS about £8 billion in compensation—let alone the damage done to the people concerned.

I have other examples. I was first approached by a whistleblower on HS2—somebody called Doug Thornton. I have spoken about him before. He is a chartered surveyor, a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and a former top civil servant. He was recruited by HS2 to be its land and property director, to value and purchase all the land needed. He identified large holes in the accounts, and delays, and he believed that HS2 was misleading Parliament as to the real cost of the project. After alerting the board and chairman, he found it necessary to resign. I do not blame him, but of course he lost his job and his career.

Many whistleblowers approached Michael Byng, a quantity surveyor who I have been working with closely, alleging fraud on the HS2 project in some pretty wide areas. As noble Lords will know, Michael Byng believes that the cost of the project should be £158 billion, compared with the Government’s costs of £102 billion, but what is important is that whistleblowers inside HS2 have contacted Mr Byng to offer their agreement and support for his appraisal costs, which they believe are being deliberately withheld from Parliament by HS2 Ltd and the Department for Transport for fear that knowledge of the true cost would lead to curtailment and cancellation.

I can go back through HS2 phase 1—London Euston is not sorted, nor is the station on the Great Western main line, and there are serious ground settlement conditions up the line—but that really is not the point. The point is that railways now use a method of measurement that I will call RMM1. HS2 denies that it uses it, but all the people within HS2 say that it is used.

Of course, this has resulted in HS2 coming up with two parallel sets of accounts. This is like having two columns for your cost accounts: one we keep for ourselves and one we share with Parliament. According to the whistleblowers, they are very different accounts. There are many reasons for this, but the general reality is that they are trying to delay news of future costs so that the news does not get out until it is too late to do anything.

These whistleblowers are directing their allegations to Mark Thurston, the chief executive of HS2 Ltd; Michael Bradley, the former chief financial officer of HS2; Rob Doran, the former project controls director of phase 1; and Tim Smart, the current managing director of phase 2. However, Mark Thurston and the Permanent Secretary are accounting officers, and accounting officers are supposed to account to Parliament that the money they say they need is sufficient and that it is sufficient to finish the job. I do not know how they can do that, because, at the moment, there is a 50% difference.

I hope that the large number of whistleblowers in HS2 will eventually receive some reward for what they have told Michael Byng and that they will tell other people quite soon. However, it is extraordinary that none of these allegations have been independently investigated. I hope that this Bill will be a safety net for all whistleblowers. There is a similar situation with Crossrail, which I will not go into because I do not have time. The whistleblowers really need to avoid the fear of retaliation; this will undoubtedly save the company and the country money. I hope the Government will give this Bill every encouragement.