Whistleblowing
9 min read
Blowing the whistle without ending your career
Whistleblowing protection is real, wide and badly understood. Whether you keep it usually turns on who you told and how you framed it — decisions people make in the first week, before they take advice.
Ingrid Holm
Partner · Investigations
In short
Give information — facts, dates, the obligation you say is breached.
You need a reasonable belief, not proof.
Disclose to the employer or a prescribed regulator first.
Keep the disclosure separate from any grievance about your treatment.
A contemporaneous note is worth more than a recollection a year later.
Protection attaches to the disclosure, not the person
A protected disclosure is information that, in the worker’s reasonable belief, tends to show one of a defined set of wrongs and is in the public interest. Each part of that sentence does work. Information means facts, not an allegation on its own. Reasonable belief does not require you to be right. Public interest can be satisfied by a group of colleagues; it does not require the public at large.
Most protection is lost at the framing stage. A message that reads as a personal complaint about treatment will not qualify, even where the underlying facts would have. The same facts, set out as what happened, when, and why it appears to breach an obligation, usually will.
Who you tell changes what you keep
Disclosure to the employer is the widest-protected route. Disclosure to a prescribed regulator is also protected, on stricter conditions. Disclosure more widely — to the press, for instance — is protected only in narrow circumstances and after further tests are met. The order matters, and the order is not obvious under pressure.
Keep the disclosure and the grievance separate. Where the two are combined, employers routinely treat the whole document as a grievance and answer it as one, which weakens the record you may later need.
Protection attaches to the disclosure, not to the person. Get the disclosure right and the rest follows.
What to do next
If you are drafting a disclosure, have it read before it is sent. An hour at the drafting stage protects a right that cannot be recovered afterwards.
This note is general information about the law in England and Wales. It is not advice on your situation, and time limits are short — take advice before you act.
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