Whistleblowing - The biggest claim so far

• Whistleblowing

1 January 2006

The first case where whistleblowing law has been thoroughly tested in a public sector context, Lingard underlines that organisations must not be able to ignore impropriety with impunity, but instead must be held accountable (details of the Lingard case).  The compensation award is believed to be the highest ever-public sector payout in a whistleblowing claim.

Close to £1/2 million was awarded in damages, and legal costs were also paid by the prison service. In extraordinarily damning terms, senior management were condemned by the employment tribunal for their "collective failures" and "seriously flawed judgement".  The government was later held to account in the House of Lords over the cost to the public purse.

The significance of this case is demonstrated by the response of the Director-General of the Prison Service who was interviewed for the BBC’s File on Four Programme.  He declared that that this had been an ‘indefensible case’ which his service ‘needed to learn lessons from’.

Lingard perfectly illustrates the dangers the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 was brought in to combat.  When Public Concern at Work, the UK’s leading whistleblowing organisation, had its complaint about DTI secrecy upheld by the Parliamentary Ombudsman, it used Lingard as evidence of why whistleblowing claims should be made public.

The case was subsequently cited by the Commission for Racial Equality in its submission to the Zahid Mubarek Inquiry into the racially motivated murder in Feltham Young Offenders Institute,  concerning the systems in place to ensure that staff concerns would in future be investigated properly.

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