| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
12.13 pm
Dr. Tony Wright (Cannock and Burntwood): I was interested in the speech of the hon. Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan). I was delighted to know that my safety had been in his hands for some years before I entered this place. I found it difficult to understand how he could say that people had a duty--his word--to speak out, while not providing them with the protection they need to enable them to fulfil that duty. That is all the Bill seeks to do.
Members of Parliament are never happier than when they are congratulating each other. I was delighted to be congratulated by my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) on being the parent or grandparent of the measure in its original form. I, in turn, congratulate him on his courage in picking up the measure when he secured a place in the ballot.
It would surely be churlish of the House--I put it no higher--to deny a Welsh Member, on St. David's day, the chance to have a fair run with such a Bill. If we are allowed today to flaunt our spurious Welsh credentials, I should say that I married into Welsh-speaking Wales25 years ago and my children have gone to school today sporting daffodils and leeks--perhaps there is a root from leeks to whistleblowers.
There is always a public interest in secrecy and confidentiality, and there is also a public interest in information. The question for all of us is how to reconcile those two public interests in specific cases and how to decide where the public interest lies when there is a conflict between the two. To those hon. Members who say that they have difficulty in knowing what the public interest is, I say, "So they should--it is a difficult concept." But if hon. Members say that it is too difficult a concept to establish, what on earth are those hon. Members doing here? Is not that precisely our job as Members of Parliament? It is also a job in which we ask the judiciary to assist us in a range of cases--and it has been doing so in relation to the law of confidence for the past century and a half.
If people think that the phrase "a culture of secrecy" is simply a glib slogan in this country, I invite them to fortify themselves and read Sir Richard Scott's report, which contains everything. I also invite them to reflect on the fact that it has now emerged that there was a certain letter from someone whom we might now describe as a whistleblower, who was working at Matrix Churchill in 1988. The person wanted to tell someone in authority about the products being produced and for whom. I think that Lord Howe managed never to respond to that letter.
If that information had been acted on, and if the whistleblower had blown the whistle publicly, we might have been able to dispense with Sir Richard Scott. We might have saved three years and several millions of pounds; we might even have saved the Government some huge embarrassment, and we might have saved civil servants the prospect of the most monstrous disciplinary action.
Mr. Robathan:
May I link the hon. Gentleman's point about Sir Richard Scott with what he said about determining the public interest? If the Scott report does nothing else, it reveals the subjective way in which judges inevitably examine a case. For example, half a dozen judges said that my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General had behaved properly, yet Sir Richard Scott said that he had not. That is the difficulty of deciding what is in the public interest. The House should determine such matters, but it would be dangerous to give them to the judiciary, as the Bill proposes.
Dr. Wright:
My antennae tell me that this is not the moment to rerun the Scott debate. Sir Richard Scott
Mr. Llew Smith (Blaenau Gwent):
As my hon. Friend is discussing Sir Richard Scott, and having read the report, does he agree that we are all secretive? The day before the report's publication, I received a reply from the President of the Board of Trade, whom I had asked to provide me with information on its printing costs. The right hon. Gentleman refused to give that because it was a state secret, or a matter of commercial confidentiality. One gets the feeling that the Government sometimes go over the top in regard to secrecy.
Dr. Wright:
Sir Richard Scott stumbled into a world that was so in the grip of secrecy that it took him three years to unravel it, and he was so shocked by what he discovered that he asked the House to consider what should be done.
In some respects, the Bill is in the spirit of what the Government have already attempted to do. About two years ago, they introduced an open government code in an attempt to insert a public interest test into the balance between the need for proper confidentiality and the need for disclosure. The Government are already ahead of the Bill in that respect, as they have determined what test should apply.
I regret, however, that the promises in the open government White Paper of July 1993 have been honoured only in the breach. We were promised two new information statutes, one on access to personal records and one on health and safety information. We now discover that there has been no progress whatsoever on that proposed legislation. This is not the moment to explore the reason for that, but, particularly in the wake of Scott, it seems odd that there has been no progress on those pledges.
In the White Paper, the Government promised to review some 250 existing statutes that prevented the disclosure of information and, wherever possible, to insert aharm test to establish the correct balance between confidentiality and disclosure. Although they invented a new deregulatory mechanism to get measures through the House speedily, it was not used to insert a single harm test into that vast volume of legislation.
The fact that there has been no publicity whatsoever for the Government's own open government code would make Sir Humphrey smile. The fact that the Government established an open government code and then did their best to tell people that it did not exist is a consummate exercise of the culture of secrecy. Of course, there will be bigger and bolder measures, but the story is the same. The Bill aims to strike the correct balance between the proper duty of confidentiality and the public interest in disclosure.
We have learnt a great deal from inquiries into major disasters by the Audit Commission and the Nolan Committee. I ask the House to consider some of the stronger passages in the Nolan report on how some of the major malpractices in public bodies came to light through whistleblowing. All the cases in which Public Concern at Work has been involved, the fraud PCW unearthed in the
defence procurement industry and elsewhere and other evidence show that the most effective way of uncovering fraud and malpractice is from within organisations. I might even suggest--then quickly erase it from the record--that, if there were to be malpractices in the House by Members of Parliament, hon. Members themselves would know more about them than anybody else.
There is public interest in confidentiality and public interest in disclosure. The Bill addresses the problem that the former is safeguarded whereas the latter is not.Lord Griffiths memorably said in the "Spycatcher" case that wrongdoing may lurk beneath the cloak of confidence. The law of confidence should and must not be used--as it is now--to conceal wrongdoing, or to punish and victimise people who, in the public interest, try to tell us about things that should not be happening. The law of confidence is used by many employers in that way. Gagging clauses are found in public and private organisations alike. Disciplinary procedures are used when people try to tell it like it is.
Last year, a consultant surgeon in Surrey wrote a short letter to The Times, not about his own hospital or trust but to express his concern about the lack of intensive care facilities in south-east England. He was hauled up before the trust for which he worked for committing a disciplinary offence and given a formal warning. When hon. Members read about such cases, I hope that they feel deep outrage, because when they occur, public interest is the loser. The public, including Members of Parliament, lose the ability to learn things that we ought to know to enable us to make good policy. The reputations and careers of people who exercise their duty are also damaged.
Many people live in a culture of fear. Many jobs today are insecure, part-time or short-term. Growing insecurity and fear in the labour market makes it much less likely that people will feel able to exercise their duty. The Bill is all about our interest in protecting that duty.
When I introduced a ten-minute rule version of my hon. Friend's Bill some months ago, I was inundated with letters, not from cranks, troublemakers or malcontents but from people who felt that they had done their duty, or had tried to do so, and had suffered the consequences. From that, I knew that the House had to legislate.
I refer to a letter from a man in Staffordshire, who reported that the chief executive of the major organisation for which he worked was engaged in malpractice. The chief executive resigned and took a golden handshake. He says:
I could give the House instance upon instance of people, working in the voluntary sector or in private organisations, describing in their own words how they came to feel that they had a duty to perform. They tried to perform that duty, and the result was the trail of misery, victimisation and persecution that shines out from the letters I have received. We need to square the circle and to get the balance right. When we consulted on the original Bill, we found vast support from the public and private sectors and professional bodies.
In congratulatory mode, I wish to congratulate the hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan Smith), who made an excellent contribution earlier. One of the reasons why the Bill should be passed is that it does not impose a regulatory burden. No new apparatus would be established by the Bill, and hugely stiff tests would be applied to anyone who claimed that they had made a protected disclosure.
Some people think that the Bill is not muscular enough, and I could wave at the House some of the similar legislation that has been introduced elsewhere. I recently returned from Australia and New Zealand clutching copies of huge measures that run to hundreds of pages and set up a vast machinery to protect whistleblowers. We have a modest little Bill that would build on the existing law of confidence. It may prove not to be effective or powerful enough, but it would be a start. The House and the country would want to know that a start has been made.
The Bill would not even require organisations to set up internal machinery. I wish that it would, but it would not. It would not even impose that tiny, useful regulatory burden. So I am not sure why the Government should have difficulties with the Bill.
We are told that the Deputy Prime Minister would not even meet my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn to talk about the Bill. I find that extraordinary, and I wonder which of his many hats the right hon. Gentleman was wearing when he felt so disinclined. He cannot have been wearing his competitiveness hat, because we know that ethical business is good business these days. He cannot have been wearing his deregulatory hat, because the Bill would be deregulatory. He certainly cannot have been wearing his presentation hat, because I can assure the Government that to be seen to oppose the Bill would do nothing for their reputation and credibility.
The Bill is absolutely not--as has been said--a charter for troublemakers and malcontents. It would simply give a modest measure of protection to the most responsible and diligent whistleblower.
"I was suspended from work for five months, during which time a concerted effort was made to discredit me. I finally had my contract terminated . . . I have been unable to find work since that date and believe that I have been blacklisted . . . I do not write to you out of bitterness or malice, but solely to offer my support to your cause. The decision I took to report this man's conduct was something that took a great deal of soul searching and many months of deliberation. I only wish your Bill had been passed several years ago."
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |