Whistleblowing Awareness Week

Maggie Throup Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mary Robinson]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right in making that point. In the context of employment law, the existing legislation relates only to people in an employer-employee relationship. As I was going on to say, there is evidence that an office of the whistleblower would incentivise disclosures. People would have a safe space in which to speak, and currently they do not have that across every sector and in every way.

[Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes the good point that the existing legislation covers only people who are employed by organisations, but it was evident on Tuesday that sometimes employees do not feel able to bring forward their concerns. In the NHS, patients or their families end up having to raise the concerns, and they are not covered by the legislation.

[Mary Robinson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, which gets to the heart of the matter. Our existing law only looks at whether there is an employer-employee relationship, and when there is a relationship breakdown and the person is forced out of their job or leaves it—whether or not that is because of constructive dismissal—they will end up in an employment tribunal arguing the case for their job and their livelihood. The issue that she raises is not touched on at all. Family members of patients, or those who have come across harm and wrongdoing in a different way, have no cover at all. Across the piece, whistleblowers do not get the protection they need, and I would like that to be changed.

To put into perspective where we are now, in 2020 the International Bar Association measured countries with whistleblowing legislation against a list of 20 best practices. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) knows, the existing legislation was introduced in 1998 by her predecessor, so the provisions have been in our law for some time and were ground- breaking at the time. The UK meets only five of the 20 best practice measures. Meanwhile, the United States, whose Office of the Whistleblower sits in the Securities and Exchange Commission, met 16 of the measures. That office received 12,300 disclosures in 2022, which was nearly double the 2020 figure. Ministers have promised a review of the existing whistleblowing framework, and that is welcome.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh, and to participate in this debate during Whistleblowing Awareness Week 2023. Let us hope it is the first of many, but let us also hope that we do not need it for many years to come.

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) on securing today’s debate, and I thank her for her work in bringing this important issue to the forefront of public debate, culminating in the inaugural Whistleblowing Awareness Week. I was delighted to accept an invitation from her to chair the roundtable earlier this week, where we held a productive discussion about the challenges that whistleblowers face in our NHS.

I will use my time today to highlight the importance of whistleblowing and add my name to the growing list of parliamentarians calling on the Government to introduce fresh legislation to protect those brave enough to expose wrongdoing where it is in the public interest.

It is worth reiterating for the benefit of those watching our proceedings, including my constituents, exactly what defines a whistleblower. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle has already quoted what is on the gov.uk website, but I do not think it does any harm to repeat it and repeat it. It defines a whistleblower as a person who will

“report certain types of wrongdoing. This will usually be something you’ve seen at work—though not always.

The wrongdoing you disclose must be in the public interest. This means it must affect others, for example the general public.”

It goes on to reassure readers that

“As a whistleblower you’re protected by law—you should not be treated unfairly or lose your job because you ‘blow the whistle’.

You can raise your concern at any time about an incident that happened in the past, is happening now, or you believe will happen in the near future.”

However, although in principle individuals are protected under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, we know that in practice whistleblowers remain vulnerable to retaliation for their actions, due in part to the current inadequacies of existing legislation.

Over many decades, thanks to the courageous efforts of whistleblowers, serious cases of wrongdoing, including corruption and malpractice, have been brought to the attention of the public. Members may recall the notable case of Katharine Gun, a GCHQ employee who, in 2003, leaked top secret information to The Observer newspaper in an attempt to prevent the Iraq war. Although the leaking of this information did not ultimately stop the war, it put an end to the prospects of a second UN resolution authorising the invasion and prompted worldwide condemnation of the actions of the US intelligence community. If Members have not already done so, I greatly encourage them to watch the film “Official Secrets”, which documents Ms Gun’s remarkable whistle- blowing story.

Many of us will also remember the repeated instances of physical and psychological abuse perpetrated by staff at Winterbourne View. These horrific crimes were only exposed when the BBC’s “Panorama” programme took up the investigations after previous allegations made by a senior nurse at the hospital were dismissed by the Care Quality Commission. The subsequent serious case review into Winterbourne View revealed hundreds of previous incidents at the hospital and warnings that were missed. This whistleblowing not only led to the criminal conviction of 11 individuals, six of whom were subsequently jailed, but to the closure of the hospital and—importantly—it put an end to the shocking abuse at that site of some of the most vulnerable people in society. In both the cases that I have cited so far, the whistleblowers believed that they had a moral duty to expose wrongdoing in the institutions that they worked in and their stories serve to highlight how whistleblowing can bring about fundamental and positive change.

It was made evident at an NHS roundtable earlier this week, which I had the honour of chairing, that although whistleblowers are protected by the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, many individual whistleblowers commonly face an uphill battle to be heard in the first place, and they can then encounter discrimination from colleagues and employers once allegations are made. We heard a very moving story from a nurse about the impact that her actions had had. She not only lost her job but her whole family were impacted. Indeed, the overall impact was so severe that she seriously considered taking her own life. We cannot let that happen to anybody who is trying to make things better for other people.

Professor Emmanouil Nikolousis was previously a clinical director at University Hospitals Birmingham, where he led a review into potential malpractice. At the roundtable, he detailed how he was bullied out of his post by senior NHS managers in 2020. This was because the findings of his report included details of how repeated breakdowns in communication between doctors at the trust had led to some patients dying without receiving appropriate care. Professor Nikolousis is now calling for a full inquiry into the trust, with his own story demonstrating why more needs to be done to protect whistleblowers.

However, the positive news is that increasingly organisations such as the NHS are moving to implement policies that help and support their employees to speak out, although I know that more still needs to be done. The freedom to speak up policy aims to ensure that everyone working within the NHS feels sufficiently safe and confident to speak up, as well as encouraging leaders within the organisation to take the opportunity to learn from those who speak up and improve matters.

These organic policies, such as the freedom to speak up, should, in combination with the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, give employees confidence that they will be treated fairly and fully supported when they raise concerns about malpractice. It has been quite evident today and throughout the week that the measures we have are not working, and we need to go further. When it comes to legislative and regulatory protections for whistleblowers, the UK currently lags far behind many other countries, including those in the EU, in imposing new and severe penalties on companies that either obstruct whistleblowers or fail to keep their identity confidential, as we have already heard. It is clear, not least from the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle and by Baroness Kramer, that both Houses of Parliament want to do more and that there is an appetite to protect whistleblowers.

I look forward to the Minister’s comments at the end of the debate, and I urge the Government to introduce the necessary legislation to protect whistleblowers further and ensure that the types of serious cases that we have heard about today and throughout the week continue to be exposed in the public interest.