Guidance

What is whistleblowing?

Under UK law, employees have a right to whistleblow. There are multiple conditions that need to be met in order for you to be protected by law, if your employer discovers you have blown the whistle and you face repercussions for it. 

1. Whistle blowing means you make a disclosure of information because you honestly believe that wrongdoing happened or is occurring. To qualify for protection, your disclosure must be made in the public interest and you must be concerned about harm in one of these categories:
   1. A criminal offence
   2. Failure to comply with a legal obligation such as data protection
   3. A miscarriage of justice
   4. Danger to health and safety such as a risk to patient care
   5. Damage to the environment
   6. Sexual harassment
   7. Deliberate concealment of any of the above
2. If you make a disclosure to the media or the public (rather than internally to your employer or to a regulatory watchdog), then additional conditions must be met, including: 
   1. you must reasonably believe that the information disclosed, and any allegation contained in it, is substantially true
   2. you must not act for personal gain
   3. A reasonable fear of victimisation, the disclosure has already been made to your employer, or where the concern is exceptionally serious.

Other top tips:

• Don’t share more than you need to, and minimise the amount of confidential information
• If you feel able to, raise the concern internally or to a regulator first as a protected disclosure

How to protect yourself

SecureDrop is a tool that enables people to send messages and documents with a high level of security. It uses encryption to keep contents hidden in transit and in storage. It uses the Tor network to conceal where messages come from, preserving anonymity.

However, this tool alone does only provides security when delivering files to us – you need to also take steps to ensure that you are protecting yourself when obtaining documentation from your workplace.

Note that we cannot provide all the necessary steps to protect yourself without a one-to-one discussion, and there will always be a degree of risk. If you have information to share, please get in touch so that we can discuss your safety and how we can support you.