NEWS ANALYSIS
Whistleblowers’ testimony is vital to uncovering hidden corruption
Will whistleblowers be silenced? Proposed changes to the law threaten to unmask future whistleblowers. SARAH HOLMES asks how can journalists protect these vital sources
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s one of seven employees who exposed the abuse of patients at a care home in south-east London, Eileen Chubb knows how important journalists are in helping whistleblowers promote the truth about corruption. “If it wasn’t for the coverage that Private Eye gave me, people who enjoyed bending patients’ fingers back for fun would still be doing it,” she says. “The media has saved lives.” After the abuse was exposed at the home, Isard House, Bupa lost its contract to provide care services there. The building has since become derelict. Chubb was fired. She now runs Compassion in Care, a charity aimed at helping people blow the
“We’ve had whistleblowers beaten for speaking out. Someone had a chair broken over their back”
whistle on abuse in care homes. Whistleblowers often seek the guarantee of anonymity, a protection that, until recently, the media had absolute power to grant. However, this February the Home Office opened consultations on proposed changes to the law, which would make it more simple for police to seize journalists’
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confidential research materials. Gavin Macfadyen, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, argues that whistleblower testimony is vital to uncovering corruption. He says that journalists need to take a stand and defend their right to protect their sources, or risk losing some of their most valuable connections and contacts. To this end, in December 2012, Macfadyen oversaw the launch of Whistleblowers UK (WBUK), the first support network for insiders lifting the lid on corruption. WBUK provides pro bono legal advice and counselling for whistleblowers. It also campaigns for changes to the law to protect whistleblowers from employer retribution and abuse. “We’ve had whistleblowers beaten for speaking out against real crimes,” says Macfadyen. “Eileen Chubb, for example, had a chair broken over her back by a ward manager at Isard House. “The law is weak. It needs to be changed if whistleblowers are to feel able to speak out safely.” Under new laws, police will still have to get approval from a judge before seizing a journalist’s materials, but will no longer need to show that they first tried to get the information by another means. Equally, journalists will have to prove that whistleblower information was not obtained in breach of confidentiality agreements, and that the whistleblower
did not break laws in disclosing it. Shaun Lintern, a reporter for the Health Service Journal, has been investigating the Mid Staffordshire NHS scandal since 2008.
“Journalists and media organisations must be ready to defend their freedoms on this point” He believes that journalists should be prepared to go to prison before giving up their sources’ identity. “It is so important to the very nature of journalism that a source’s identity be protected,” he says. “Whistleblowers would be dissuaded from talking to journalists if they feared their identity was at risk of being revealed. “Journalists and media organisations must be ready to defend their freedoms on this point.” Chubb is appalled at the prospect that journalists could be made to reveal the identity of their sources. She fears that if the proposed changes go through, fewer whistleblowers will come forward. “The bottom line is that the truth will become censored,” she says. “Lives will be lost if whistleblowers don’t feel able to go to journalists and speak out.” X