What is Whistleblowing Protection (PIDA)?

Full Definition

The Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 (PIDA), which inserted whistleblowing protections into the Employment Rights Act 1996, protects workers who make a "protected disclosure" -- broadly, a disclosure of information which, in the worker's reasonable belief, is made in the public interest and tends to show one or more specified types of wrongdoing, such as a criminal offence, breach of a legal obligation, miscarriage of justice, danger to health and safety, damage to the environment, or the deliberate concealment of any of these. A disclosure made purely about a worker's own personal employment grievance, without any wider public interest element, generally will not qualify, following case law establishing that self-interested complaints alone fall outside the protection, even though a disclosure can still be protected if it also happens to serve the worker's own interests alongside a genuine public interest element. To be protected, a disclosure must generally be made to the employer, a prescribed regulator (such as the Financial Conduct Authority or Health and Safety Executive, for disclosures within their remit), or, in more limited circumstances, more widely (for example, to the media), with wider disclosures requiring the worker to meet additional conditions, such as having previously raised the matter internally or with a regulator, or reasonably believing they would be victimised or evidence concealed if they raised it internally first. Workers who make a protected disclosure have the right not to be subjected to any detriment (such as being denied a promotion, given a poor reference, or excluded from meetings) by their employer as a result, and employees additionally have the right not to be dismissed for making one, with a dismissal for this reason being automatically unfair. Critically, whistleblowing dismissal claims do not require the usual two years' qualifying service that applies to ordinary unfair dismissal claims, meaning even a very new employee dismissed for whistleblowing can bring a claim, and there is no statutory cap on the compensation that can be awarded for a successful whistleblowing dismissal claim, unlike ordinary unfair dismissal, which is subject to a statutory maximum. Because of the potentially unlimited exposure and lack of a qualifying period, employers are expected to have clear whistleblowing policies and to investigate concerns raised under them carefully, and workers considering raising a concern are often advised to take advice on how to frame a disclosure to maximise the chance it is treated as protected.

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