Celebrating 30 years of supporting whistleblowers
In 2022 Protect advised almost 2,500 individuals and supported around 220 employers with their whistleblowing arrangements
Thursday 6th June 2023
The UK’s whistleblowing charity, Protect, celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in 2023 and today publishes its impact report and annual report for 2022. Launching its report, the charity highlights:
- Protect in 2022 advised almost 2,500 individuals in 2022 with 12,961 interactions in support (interactions refers to individual calls, emails and advice to whistleblowers.) This shows that each caller receives an average of 5 interactions: whistleblowing is rarely straightforward and ongoing advice through the process is invaluable.
- 23% of calls in 2022 came from the charity sector, and 27% from the public sector. Working practices and governance issues – which includes concerns about toxic workplace cultures as a result of discrimination, bullying and harassment – made up over a third of all calls (36%)).
- Last year Protect supported 220 employers from across all industries and sectors, who have a combined workforce of around 1.4 million workers. This includes training, consultancy and benchmarking best practice whistleblowing arrangements. Over 150 businesses have used Protect’s unique whistleblowing benchmark to evaluate their arrangements against best practice, and 220 employers are now members of Protect.
- Our top advice pages included “What is Whistleblowing” (viewed over 9,000 times), and our outline of the Public Interest Disclosure Act was viewed over 11,000 times in 2022. Our new template pages have been widely used and received over 5,000 views. For example, a caller wrote: “I followed the advice on your website represented myself and was successful in obtaining interim relief”.
- Our call for the government to update whistleblowing law and our research on what happens to whistleblowers has resulted in the recently announced review of the whistleblowing framework.
Elizabeth Gardiner, Protect CEO,
“As Protect enters its 30th year, the need for the charity is as strong as ever. We know whistleblowing like no other organisation – we understand the bravery and difficulties whistleblowers face from advising 50,000 callers since 1993, and we know from our training and consultancy work with thousands of employers, how challenging it can be for employers to get it right.
Our legal advisers support individuals through their whistleblowing journey, providing not just one-off advice on their legal rights, but also continued support to help them get their public interest concerns heard and addressed by employers or others.
Advising whistleblowers can only be half the story – we need to change the cultures in which they are speaking up. We’re proud to work with some of the best employers in the country and our support over 2022 has a potential impact on 1.4 million workers.
However, too many employers treat whistleblowers as a problem and shoot the messenger rather than treating whistleblowing intelligence as a business benefit.
“We’re pleased that the Government has now announced a review of the law. As a charity we played a key role in drafting the Private Member’s Bill that became the Public Interest Disclosure Act. But we know that Act now needs to be updated to keep pace with the modern workforce and ensure we once again lead the world in our whistleblowing protections.”
-ENDS-
About Protect
Founded in 1993, Protect’s aim is to protect the public interest by helping workers to speak up to stop harm and wrongdoing. We support whistleblowers by providing free and confidential legal advice. We support employers to implement effective whistleblowing arrangements. We campaign for legal and policy reform to better protect whistleblowing.
Protect will be celebrating its 30th anniversary with a day-long conference on 5 October 2023 – details are here.
See impact report here.
Media contact
For more detail please contact: press@protect-advice.org.uk