Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill — House of Lords, 2015-03-11
Topic: Mixed Topics
Michael Wills (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 59 and Amendments 59A to 59F. All these amendments seek to provide additional protections for whistleblowers, and they follow on from discussion of these issues in Committee I shall take Amendment 59 first. It arises from the Government’s response to the amendment that I moved in Committee seeking to place a code of conduct for whistleblowing on a statutory basis. I shall not repeat all the arguments that were made in Committee, but a statutory code of conduct would send out to all organisations a powerful signal about the importance that Parliament attaches to providing adequate protection for whistleblowers, and it would help to drive cultural change within organisations to encourage whistleblowing In Committee, the Minister engaged with this very constructively—I repeat my thanks to her for doing so—and she did not reject the case for this. However, she felt that the voluntary code that the Government are developing would offer sufficient protection. She said: "We will keep this under review, and if this is not bringing about the change that we expect to see, we will consider introducing a statutory code of practice".—[Official Report, 26/1/15; col. GC 9.] All Amendment 59 seeks to do is to ensure that such a review does indeed take place. The government measures in the Bill to improve protections for whistleblowers are welcome, and I congratulate the Minister and all her colleagues on them, but I am sorry that I could not convince her in Committee to go further. Loopholes remain in these protections and, where loopholes exist, all history suggests that the powerful take advantage of them The action that the Government are now taking on whistleblowing is being driven by terrible recent scandals, which might have been prevented had better protection for whistleblowers been in place. This is a clear lesson from, for example, the Francis reports into the NHS and the recent inquiry into the Rotherham abuse scandal. Despite this, the facts of Westminster life are such that scandals fade as time passes. Unfortunately, Ministers and officials come and go, collective memory is increasingly eroded and there are always new pressures on new Ministers and officials. In these circumstances, we should not wait for another scandal to be revealed to introduce any necessary new whistleblowing protections Continuing scrutiny is required to ensure that whistleblowers receive all the protections that they need to prevent such scandals recurring. This amendment seeks to set up a regular review process to do just that. It is not onerous. It simply puts in place a system to guarantee delivery of what the Minister has said that the Government will do. I accept, of course, the Minister’s good faith in offering reassurances, but because of the circumstances that I have just described future delivery of those cannot necessarily be guaranteed and relied upon. In these circumstances, I hope that the Minister will accept this simple amendment Amendment 58ZA provides improved protections for whistleblowers who are job applicants. Unlike other areas of discrimination law, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 does not currently consider job applicants to be workers and so they do not receive protection for whistleblowing. Your Lordships’ House discussed the case for tackling this anomaly in Committee. Again, I do not intend to repeat all the arguments, but the Minister said then that, while she appreciated the amendment that I moved, she rejected it because, "there is work to be done to get this right and it will take time, beyond this Parliament, to reach a suitable solution. It would not be right to add this half-cooked work to a Bill designed primarily to help small business and not to introduce new burdens for employers".—[Official Report, 25/1/15; col. GC 10.] The noble Baroness, Lady Mobarik, expressed from the Government Back Benches her concern that this important Bill should not be held up. I am delighted that, between Committee and today, the Government have reconsidered the situation and have decided that after all there is time to introduce new protections for whistleblowing job applicants. I congratulate them. I particularly congratulate the Minster on their change of heart and I thank her for her characteristic courtesy in alerting me of it in advance But—I am afraid that there is a "but"—the Government’s amendment covers only the NHS. There is no logical reason why it should be so restricted. That is why Amendment 58ZA is still necessary. It extends the Government’s proposals for protecting whistleblowing job applicants in the NHS to all workers. The risk of the sort of informal blacklisting that government Amendment 58A tackles occurs far more widely than just in the NHS. For example, in the construction industry there have been notorious instances of workers failing to find new work after raising concerns about safety. No Government have adopted such a piecemeal approach to other legislation that outlaws discrimination. Actionable offences of sex and race discrimination are not restricted to the NHS, so why should discrimination against whistleblowers be so restricted This is a short, simple amendment. It will prevent what I assume is the unintended consequence of the government amendment in creating what would be a two-tier system of protection, with NHS workers, important and valuable as they are, privileged to enjoy protections not extended to all other workers who seek to protect the public by whistleblowing. Such a two-tier system would be unfair to individual workers and would hinder the development of the culture of transparency, which I think all your Lordships would agree has been shown in scandal after scandal to be so critical in protecting the public. I hope that the Minister will finish today the work which her own amendments have started and accept Amendment 58ZA.