Mark Ellis The 31st May 2025 marks sixty years of Employment Tribunals – colloquially known in the legal world as ETs. The ET is the final destination for whistleblowing cases – often a tortuous process that pits an individual whistleblower against the might of their employer’s legal team. Recent reports have shown that the UK employment tribunal backlog has hit record levels. Not good news for whistleblowers, as our latest blog explores…
May has seen the the Employment Rights Bill reach Committee Stage in the House of Lords, giving all members of the Lords an opportunity to speak and debate amendments. We’ve worked with a wide range of peers from across all parties to amass support for our proposals to modernise whistleblowing protection.
Join us for a World Whistleblowers’ Day event, on June 24th, 10:00am: “Attitudes to whistleblowing – from Gen Z to Baby Boomers”, in partnership with Lloyds Banking Group. Shining a spotlight on new research from Protect, the UK’s whistleblowing charity, into generational attitudes to whistleblowing and how this impacts speaking up amongst the workforce.
Protect welcomes this comprehensive review of workplace culture at the BBC and the proposed actions to improve whistleblowing systems. As an industry that relies on freelancers and short-term contracts protections are needed to ensure everyone feels safe and respected at work. Its concerning this review reveals that junior employees, freelancers and those on short-term contracts are much less likely to speak up than permanent BBC staff due to their precarious employment status.
In a disappointing judgment, the Court of Appeal has said that job applicants are not protected if they blow the whistle, and in doing so has thrown the ball firmly back into Parliament’s court to decide who is, and who is not, a whistleblower. More positively, the Court restated the value of whistleblowing and noted the purpose of the law is “to protect the public interest by ensuring that information about wrongdoing, or threats to health and safety or the environment, could be disclosed”
The Court of Appeal has determined that job applicants do not have the protection of whistleblowing law. Protect intervened as a third party in the case of Sullivan v Isle of Wight Council to argue that whistleblowing protection should be available to all external job applicants.
The government’s landmark Employment Rights Bill has now bounced from the Commons to the Lords as it continues its progress through Parliament. After a highly scrutinised passage through the Commons that led to more than 200 pages of amendments tabled at the Report Stage and Third Reading the Bill will be debated in the Lords for the first time on Thursday 27 March. This Bill provides a critical opportunity to improve whistleblowing protections for everyone in the workplace and revamp the way employers address and manage whistleblowing.
Every scandal comes to light, in the wake of ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, whistleblowing scandals are now taking centre stage on TV with New Netflix series ‘Toxic Town’, starring Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education and The White Lotus), and Doctor Who’s Jodie Whittaker. The show has been labelled the UK’s Erin Brockovich, as a group of women take on their local council and the local steelworks following a pattern of birth defects in young children that whistleblowers were able to prove could have been avoided.
Protect welcomes the publication of the new report from the Committee on Public Standards in Public Life “Recognising and responding to early warning signs in public sector bodies” and calls for the introduction of a statutory duty on employers to investigate whistleblower concerns to give workers the confidence they will be listened to when they speak up.
In 2024, Protect significantly impacted the lives of thousands of whistleblowers by providing practical and legal advice on how to safely and effectively raise workplace concerns. The UK’s leading whistleblowing charity worked on 3,336 total cases, a rise of 10% on 2023.
