Contribution
My Lords, before I speak to the amendments in my name, I extend my thanks to my noble friend the Minister for his openness and willingness to engage with all parts of the House as the Bill progresses through it. We are all very grateful to him. I associate myself with everything that has been said so far by Members of the Committee in speaking to amendments, particularly the magisterial encompassing of the panoramic vision that the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, gave.
I will speak in particular to Amendments 40 and 54, because the Bill, as we all recognise, has the ability and potential to transform our public sector and how it responds to major scandals and wrongdoing within it. Yet simply imposing a duty of candour to speak up without making it meaningful within an organisation and increasing the protections available to those who do may mean that the impact of the Bill will turn out to be not as significant as I think we all want it to be.
As others have said, whistleblowing is a vital tool of public accountability. We know from research that when whistleblowers are not listened to, harm occurs to the individual directly affected. Covering up wrongdoing and even criminal behaviour also inflicts significant costs on the wider public. Too often, the taxpayer picks up the bill by way of investigations, inquiries and compensation schemes. The whistleblowing charity, Protect, for example, recently studied three public sector scandals where whistleblower warnings were not heeded. It found that the avoidable costs to the taxpayer totalled over £400 million. Moreover, nearly 40% of callers from local and central government to Protect’s whistleblowing advice line say that their employers simply ignore their concerns.
Whistleblowers have two fears: that they will be harmed as a result of speaking up and that it is futile to do so. These amendments seek to address those problems. Amendment 54 seeks to ensure that whistleblowers who come forward can do so with confidence that their claims will be investigated and that they will be safe from retaliation and victimisation. Amendment 40 requires that the disciplinary consequences of failing to comply with this duty to investigate should be set out. Ensuring that everyone in any organisation is aware that failure to comply has severe consequences is crucial in making the duty to investigate whistleblowing effective.
I turn to Amendment 119, which is very timely, because at Second Reading and throughout the proceedings today we have heard how important whistleblowing protection is. The Government have recognised the need to legislate for such improvements. I quote from the then Minister in 2024:
“We are aware of the long-overdue requirement to look at whistleblowing law”.—[Official Report, Commons, Employment Rights Bill Committee, 10/12/24; col. 375.]
In 2025, he said that
“legislation is now a quarter of a century old”
—as the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, has just described—and
“needs looking at in the light of experience and the number of scandals that have been mentioned. We are considering where we go next on whistleblowing legislation”.—[Official Report, Commons, Employment Rights Bill Committee, 11/3/25; col. 862.]
Well, the Government need think no more, because today they have launched a very welcome consultation on this matter. Once that is concluded, there is no need to delay legislation further for more than the few months needed to digest the results of that consultation. It does not need longer. The problems are well known, as the noble Baroness has described. They have been known for a long time. All the remedies are piled up on the laptops of Ministers and officials, yet legislative time is scarce and fiercely competed for, so with an election looming in the not-too-distant future, any legislation resulting from this consultation could be years away, after many years of prevarication. In the meantime, all the problems and injustices of the current situation will continue.
This amendment therefore seeks to head off such a failure by giving government the powers of secondary legislation to do what almost everyone in both Houses, all those who have suffered grievously from deficient whistleblower protection and all those who will suffer in the future recognise as urgently desirable. I hope my noble friend will recognise how helpful I am being in giving him the opportunity to reassure your Lordships’ House, by accepting this modest amendment, that the Government are not using this consultation to kick these critical issues into the long grass once again.