Examination of Witnesses

Part of Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 11:46 am on 19 June 2012.

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Paul Kenny: On the Secretary of State’s involvement, I am not sure where that will lead. It is not entirely clear whether there will be interventions on individual cases. There will be lorry-loads of documents and appeals flying around, and you will need extra office space if we get to that ridiculous level.

Tribunals hear the facts of the case. They are balanced and do not always come out in favour of the respondent or the defendant. It just does not work like that. The first fear and danger is that the new levels will be used to downgrade the number of awards over time. That is a real concern—it looks like the thin end of the wedge. Secondly, they will, in many cases, undervalue the damage done to individuals.

You have to go back to the process of why industrial tribunals, which is what they were, were first thought of. It was originally a simple system. It has become very legalistic now, but it was supposed to be a simplistic system whereby people got an opportunity to see whether they had been unfairly treated and to receive recompense for that. It does not effectively work out that you can arbitrarily decide that, because someone who is really badly treated happens to work in a company that has only 25 employees, that, somehow, is worth a lot less than somebody who works for a company with 2,000 employees. It is about the nature of the injury.

Whistleblowing is an incredibly dangerous area to get into. Thousands of UK citizens—perhaps some of them from your own constituencies—have been blacklisted in the construction industry and it took years for people to have the courage to come forward. Any restriction of encouraging people to come forward to blow that whistle is damaging to freedoms. It is a dangerous route to go down. It goes in an opposite direction to that followed by places such as America, which is offering much larger rewards for people to come forward and blow the whistle to highlight corruption, particularly in relation to contracts. If the measure is designed to stop people telling the truth about lawbreaking, it is a misdirected approach.