Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what assessment he has made of the potential implications for his policies of trends in the level of the use of Non-Disclosure Agreements during corporate restructuring in safety-critical sectors; and whether he plans to take steps to ensure non-disclosure agreements cannot be used prevent employees and union representatives from participating in statutory consultation processes.

The Government is unable to assess sector-based trends on the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as they are private contractual agreements and data on their use is not collected.

While NDAs can lawfully be used to require one or more parties to keep certain information confidential (for example, trade secrets), there are a range of legal limitations on their use. For example, NDAs cannot prevent someone from making a whistleblowing disclosure (known formally as a “protected disclosure”) or a disclosure required by law.