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Whistleblowing at Work

My Lords, I should declare an interest in that 20 years ago I set up the charity, Public Concern at Work. I think it took me five or six years to persuade the Charity Commission that it should be given charitable status, but we got there in the end and it has done a wonderful job ever since. I commend the PCaW commission on this report. It is led by my old friend Tony Hooper—the right honourable Sir Anthony Hooper and a former judge in the Court of Appeal, I should say. There is no point in pretending that this is anything other than an incredibly vexed set of issues and that there is a great deal of fear where whistleblowing is concerned. There is also no point in disguising from ourselves the fact that we live in an age of collapsing standards. Over the past few years our own proud City of London has been embroiled in tragic and scandalous behaviour of all sorts. Great banks have completely lost their way. However, it is not just about us because this is a predicament across the developed world, and probably the underdeveloped world. The need for whistleblowing is therefore ever greater.

It is an extraordinary fact that in the LIBOR and PPI scandals and the foreign exchange rigging, apparently no whistleblowing went on. Those corrupt scandals lasted for years and involved hundreds of people—in the PPI case tens of thousands of people—all of

whom knew that what they were doing was wrong. Most of them knew that it was unlawful and some knew that it was corrupt. The need, therefore, to act on the central provisions of this report certainly seems to be quite plangent. In saying that, I am not deluding myself, because I agree entirely with the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, that without an underlying moral cohesion of our society in the minds and hearts of ordinary people, no amount of law and regulation will succeed. The one can only buttress the other, but we need to buttress more effectively.

The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 was good as far as it went but, first, it did not go far enough. Some of the areas of insufficiency are set out in the commission’s recommendations. Secondly, I want to emphasise strongly that there is a total insufficiency of enforcement, a point that I hope the Minister will take back with him. Given the choice of putting much more effort into enforcement and making no changes to the law, I would go for the former every time. How many cases of fraud have been prosecuted on the back of evidence given by whistleblowers? The Minister may not know—it is not fair to spring it on him.

Perhaps I may mention Paul Moore of Halifax Bank of Scotland, who 10 years ago was dismissed for blowing the whistle on a state of affairs within that massive entity that was wrong and completely unsustainable. To give him his full title, Mr Moore was the head of Group Regulatory Risk and the good practice manager. After a great deal of in-depth inquiry, he reported to the main board, as he did at every board meeting, that the bank’s system was not sustainable. Indeed, one senior employer told him that to meet sales and marketing targets, the bank had to act unethically and that it could not be done ethically. That man has been blackballed in the City from that day to this. He never got an interview for any job he applied for and he was not offered a job. We have to understand, too, that we have a culture whereby people involved in certain aspects of our economy are themselves corrupted by all this, and who view anybody who tries to uphold the law as a traitor. Noble Lords would not believe what this man has been called in the intervening years. I have spoken to him about this at length and in depth and have his consent to mention these facts today.

I know that this is a difficult area of enforcement—I make no bones about it. It requires sensitivity, extreme tenacity of prosecutorial effort and a detailed knowledge of the law. Whoever takes this on will be met by legions of expensive lawyers and accountants because that is another feature of our times—the total disparity of resources in trying to uphold the law in relation to fraud and so on.

I commend recommendation 21 which asserts that tribunals dealing with the Public Interest Disclosure Act should be presided over by someone with specialist training in this field. We should look at what the Americans do, as they have a public authority with responsibility for dealing with whistleblowing. I think that is right. We need to go that way and have an authority—it may be small, but strong—which can uphold and enforce the law in conjunction with the prosecutorial authorities.

Finally, I believe that the most important body of recommendations in the commission’s report are those which beef up the role and the duty of the regulators in all aspects of our economy so that they have the power to require large companies to do something effective to enable whistleblowing to thrive to the benefit of companies, the economy and the country. That is the point, is it not? I wish well the Minister, the Government and all who have to take these important matters forward.

6.17 pm