The BBC and other news agencies have published articles about a man named Hazar Denli. He alleges to have been sacked by Jaguar Land Rover for raising concerns about the safety of components in the chassis of a car produced for Vietnamese car maker ‘Vinfast’.
Apparently, Mr Denli first raised his concern internally within the Tata Group (for which he worked as lead engineer on the car’s front suspension and chassis) before later posting them on the social media platform Reddit. His posts on Reddit are said to have followed a fatal crash in the US involving an earlier model of the car which had the same components.
Mr Denli has issued a claim about this in the Employment Tribunal. Watch this space!
This follows alarming stories in the press concerning the apparent suicides of well publicised whistleblowers in America.
With whistleblowing therefore in sharp focus, let’s briefly revisit what protection is in place for whistleblowers under English law and look to the future.
The law
The starting point is the protections under sections 43A to 43L, 47B and 103A of the Employment Rights Act 1996, which provide:
- Where the reason, or principal reason, for an employee’s dismissal is that they have made a protected disclosure, they will be automatically unfairly dismissed, and their compensation will be uncapped (though they must take reasonable steps to find suitable alternative employment).
- Workers must not be subjected to any detriment on the ground they have made a protected disclosure.
Additionally, the Public Interest Disclosure at Work Act 1998 makes any part of a contract that seeks to silence a worker from making such a disclosure void.
To make a protected disclosure all the following elements must apply:
- You must have disclosed/given information:
- That information must have been about one of the following types of wrongdoing:
- Criminal offences.
- Breach of any legal obligation.
- Miscarriages of justice.
- Danger to the health and safety of any individual.
- Damage to the environment.
- The deliberate concealing of information about any of the above.
- You must have reasonably believed the information tended to show that such a wrongdoing has taken place, is taking place or is likely to take place.
- You must have reasonably believed the information was given in the public interest. A personal grievance is unlikely to be protected, unless it is somehow in the public interest.
- You must have made the disclosure to the right person. The starting point for this will likely be in line with a Company policy, to a senior employee (with authority over you) or a regulator.
It follows that it is sometimes difficult to determine whether such a disclosure was made. This is a specialist area, but there have and will continue to be clear situations where this has occurred.
Then the question becomes whether the later sanction was connected with the disclosure. For an illustration of the complexity that can arise in relation to this question, see our previous blog on the outcome of the well-publicised claim brought by Ling Kong, where we represented the Claimant.
The future
There is clear public interest in encouraging whistleblowers to speak out on important issues. This means there is and will continue to be regular debate on whether to extend these legal protections. As the BBC article notes, a bill is soon to be introduced to Parliament with the proposal to set up an Office of the Whistleblower to protect workers who speak up.
There is some concern, however, that Labour’s proposed Employment Rights Bill has missed an opportunity to require whistleblowing concerns to be investigated by the recipients of them.
This blog was written by Ben Lindsay, Solicitor at didlaw.
