Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill — House of Lords, 2015-03-11
Topic: Law and Crime
Andrew Wyndham Phillips (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, my name is also to this group of amendments. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Wills and Lord Low of Dalston, for making most of the points that need making, and making them forcefully It seems extraordinary that the Government should have introduced Amendment 58A in the wake of the 200-page report by Robert Francis QC, entitled Freedom to Speak Up and published only last month. It is bizarre that they confine the provisions in the amendment to the National Health Service, for reasons which have been touched on by the two Peers who have already spoken. The need for the protection of Amendment 58A is universal I should perhaps say that in my long legal career I have dealt with a number of whistleblowing cases, and was charged back in the 1980s with trying to register a charity which had as its principal purpose the support of whistleblowers. That was successful—not, I may say, without vast and prolonged effort, because at first the Charity Commission viewed the very idea as bizarre. In 1993, the charity Public Concern at Work was formed and is still operating with huge effect. All of us here tonight are grateful for the work that it has done and the information which it has provided to us under the leadership of Cathy James. Its work leads it even now—or perhaps more than ever now—to advise about 800 people a year who have personal, direct, often plangent problems in relation to their employment and their attempt to try to get those who employ them to take seriously malfeasance—sometimes corruption, sometimes wilful and terrible illegality Public Concern at Work is, as I said, better informed than any other agency in this country as to just what whistleblowers have to go through. Our point is that whistleblowers are not some little sideshow. If we are serious about attacking the widespread and growing corruption and criminality that, I fear, infects so much of what we value in this country, we have to support whistleblowers. Frankly, they are the only people who can uncover criminality at source, often at a time when, if it can be dealt with, doing so will save vast loss and suffering. One has to look only at the collapse of the financial markets of the world, led by the City of London in 2008, to realise just what terrible losses we have all suffered—trillions rather than billions—by reason of the fact that there were virtually no whistleblowers from within the City of London, or indeed the other financial centres, who were able to get the facts relating to what was going on in their entities to the authorities in time for them to take action Again, I have a certain amount of personal experience of this. One thinks, for example, of Paul Moore of HBOS. He blew the whistle, except that he blew the whistle to his own board, saying openly and clearly that the measures taken in that bank to balance risk and opportunity were unsustainable and were leading the bank, and had led the bank, into the most dangerous of situations. He not only got no succour when he took this matter up the scale in the bank but has not had a job in the City of London since then—we are talking about 2007 or 2008—despite his huge experience as a former partner at KPMG and senior financial officer at HBOS.