New Petitions

I come to the committee as a taxpayer who pays for public services. I was last before the committee three years ago, and I also talked about whistleblowing then. I was trying to get councils to implement whistleblowing policies. At that time, I had just been fired by the City of Edinburgh Council for gross misconduct. I had blown the whistle. I worked in housing, and I had written to a councillor about the head of schools leading the Mortonhall inquiry. That was outside my job; I wrote to the councillor as a ratepayer. The councillor happened to know that I worked at the council, so they sent the letter to my boss, and I was immediately suspended. Thereafter, the council treated me as a whistleblower, although I maintain to this day that I was not really a whistleblower—I was just a concerned and unhappy ratepayer.

At the same time, I had done other things—I had asked the Unison annual general meeting to agree to a motion about implementing a whistleblower hotline at the council and, in my own time, I had campaigned against the closure of Castlebrae high school. However, I did not know why I had been suspended. All that I knew was that I had done something wrong.

Like most public sector bodies, a council has a huge influence on our lives. I was banned from going to my son’s school, libraries and anywhere that the City of Edinburgh Council owned without seeking permission. All those who work in the public sector consume services as taxpayers but, if they fall foul of their employer, their right to those services is compromised.

The law allows the employer to do as it wishes in employment matters, so the council was able to trawl the internet for filth about me and to use BT and public funding to do that. That is what any public sector employer can do. The council found that I had written an email to a Miami foundation in which I had compared the council’s actions to those in a US film called “The Corporation”.

It is pertinent to any reflection on whistleblowing to note that, when they are threatened, big organisations respond in a psychopathic manner. They lack empathy, emotions and conscience and they have no guilt. They often have a history of victimising others. The body acts as it chooses, has few constraints and is unable to learn from mistakes. Those are all characteristics of a psychopath.

The trawl found the email and I was fired four months later.

What I am saying is all relevant. I am trying to explain to the committee the cost of whistleblowing. Unless members understand that cost, they cannot consider the petition. The cost of whistleblowing is paid for by all of us. Do you get my drift? Everybody pays for public services. If those services are not working properly for whatever reason, we all foot the bill. Do you accept that?

Okay—you have ruined my speech.

The costs were not just personal; I would say that the process cost about £50,000. That brings me on to the petition. The costs of suspending whistleblowers in the NHS are phenomenal. Jane Hamilton—the doctor who was at the heart of the St John’s hospital inquiry—was off work for four or five years, and the cost of employing locums to take her place was £1 million, which is a lot of money.

Whistleblowers lose their jobs, their reputation and their family life—I lost my home and my family. The taxpayer loses, too. I want the committee to consider such costs when it looks at my petition.

I understand that the best way for a public sector employee to raise concerns about inefficiencies or inadequacies in the public sector is to route them through a hotline, where such a mechanism exists, but what the NHS has is a helpline, which more or less tells employees to go back to their manager or to go to a trade union. That is a problem.

Last week, the Northern Ireland Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority, which oversees health and social care, published a review of whistleblowing arrangements—I am holding it up. That review comes to the same conclusion as I did—that the fact that the helpline is getting fewer and fewer calls does not necessarily mean that the service is getting better. NHS Scotland faces compensation claims from staff and patients that amount to £40 million a year, which is a huge amount of money. The staff are in a position to help to cut that cost.

The Northern Ireland publication, which is very interesting, talks about a helpline. I do not think that the authority has really understood the impact of what we have in Scotland. We have had a helpline for three years, but the level of complaints has gone not up but down. That is not necessarily because the service is getting better.

The authority points to the need to test the silence. It says that, if bodies are getting fewer and fewer complaints, they need to ask why that is. There needs to be some way of testing the silence, but there is none at the moment. A staff survey indicates that only 57 per cent of staff feel comfortable about speaking up if there are problems in the NHS workplace. That means that almost half do not feel comfortable, which is a phenomenal amount. If they are not using the helpline, what is happening?

09:45

There are a number of issues about how we deal with whistleblowing in the public sector. I argue that having a helpline that refers whistleblowers back to management is not the answer. We need a mechanism that takes the concern off the whistleblower’s shoulders. When they have lodged their concern, regardless of whether they choose to do it anonymously, it should then go to the decision-making body.

The point of employing a hotline is that it can filter the stuff into major and operational matters. If it is an operational matter—for example, “Such-and-such has a bigger desk than I do,” which is more like a grievance or a complaint—it should be dealt with internally by middle management. However, if it is about quality of service, it should go to the board sub-committee that is responsible for overseeing quality. I am thinking of the staff governance sub-committee. Every board has one and it includes non-executive members, who are appointed to oversee how the health board is working. The whistleblowing champions come from within that group, but they do not have the knowledge, because there is no mechanism for them to find out how much whistleblowing is going on, so they cannot act as champions.

All I know about the partnership arrangement is that there is a group that involves the unions and NHS management in jointly overseeing the health service in Scotland. I know what the NHS whistleblowing policies look like and I can tell you that the policies that are given to staff give no indication that there is an individual champion to whom concerns can be taken. They mention the national confidential alert line, which is the helpline that I told you about.

In September last year, Paul Gray wrote to all the health boards—I have the letter here—with a number of things that he wanted them to do. We are a year on from that and, if you examine the minutes for the 14 territorial health boards in Scotland, you will find that none of those actions has been taken—well, the boards have appointed the champions, but they have done nothing else. Given that those champions’ identities are kept secret, how can they champion anything? My definition of a champion is that they are not a person whom nobody knows of. I can go through the things that Paul Gray said to the boards if you like and point to the things that are not happening. One of the things that he suggested was that there should be a named contact for whistleblowing, but that does not exist.

I cannot completely answer your question because I do not know enough, but I know that what the Government thinks is happening is not what is happening.

I lodged a petition to the petitions committee at the City of Edinburgh Council three years ago. That committee went off and said that it would consider it. The corporate management team came back and said that it wanted Public Concern at Work to run a helpline. That was in May 2013. At the same time, the Scotland Patients Association held a conference here in Edinburgh at which, with Dr Kim Holt from Patients First, it identified that the NHS helpline was not working.

That was three years ago, and things have not got any better since. I campaigned hard at that point for the council not to have a helpline. That took a lot of work, and it was only because the Evening News got involved and a lot of people wrote to their councillors to say that they wanted a staff hotline rather than a helpline that the council, in the end, agreed to make the change.

The issue is about how to manage risk effectively. When I finally had a meeting with the head of legal at the City of Edinburgh Council, I convinced him that the issue was about the management of risk. He saw the light and agreed that the council’s risk committee could take reports.

A year and a half later, in January of this year, the council published a report saying how effective the hotline has been and how much it has improved efficiency. No one is boasting that the NHS helpline has done that, but the council is now saying—about something that it had initially opposed—that the hotline is a huge boon.

Public Concern at Work runs the helpline. You would get a call handler who knows what the NHS whistleblowing policy is, because they have it in front of them. They guide the caller through the policy and advise them that the issue would be best addressed internally by their going back to their manager or by going to the union. The helpline publishes its data on the Scottish Government website, so we know that 90 per cent of callers have already been to their manager and been disappointed by the response, yet the helpline tells them to go back there again.

Eventually, if things go very bad, the helpline will get involved in taking the case to Health Improvement Scotland but, over the past three years, there have been only six such cases.

The hotline is a different beast entirely. When you phone a hotline, the first question is not “Who are you?”, but “Which organisation do you work for?” The hotline is concerned about the organisation. After the call handler gets that knowledge, they will then say, “If you choose to, you can remain anonymous, but we will log your call,” and they take written notes throughout the conversation of what the caller’s concern is. At the end of that, they tell the caller that they will give them a written report of their concern and that they will also pass on that report to the risk committee or whatever body is appointed to take the reports. Therefore, the whistleblower has not been pulled into the nightmare of having to deal with middle management; rather, they have had the weight taken from their shoulders, and that has been given to the hotline, which has then committed to taking the matter to the risk committee, for example. That is what is so utterly different about a hotline. That experience means that whistleblowers are not frightened of retribution or of being ignored, because the hotline provider has a commitment to keeping the whistleblower informed of progress relating to their concern.

It is a commercial arrangement. Hotlines are commercial organisations, so they only provide the service for money. However, they function very effectively in routing concerns and in managing risk. A hotline is different because there is a single point of contact, through a single number, that any one of the 160,000 people who work in the NHS in Scotland could use. The single number would take the concern and route it to the relevant committee for them. As I said, a hotline takes the weight from the whistleblower’s shoulders; they no longer have to carry the burden or fear of retribution and victimisation.

The helpline is not set up to take reports. Public Concern at Work’s founding principle is that it is not there to route concerns to a committee. It is a different beast entirely. Public Concern at Work is, fundamentally, a charity, whereas hotlines are run by commercial businesses.

I would posit that, if the NHS thinks that it needs to change the helpline, it ought to retender, because it will probably get a better price. There is commercial competition; there are a number of hotline providers in Britain. The one that I know the most about provides hotlines for the City of Edinburgh Council and for three health trusts in England. Those health trusts use that provider because it allows staff to route concerns directly to the whistleblowing champion or to the relevant committee. It is a different beast, with a different service and a different way of operating, and it works in a different way, because it is set up to log reports and to take reports to committees.

There are two other trusts—the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust and Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust. I only found out about those yesterday. That makes three trusts in all that might have a view that could be helpful.

Can I request that you write to the whistleblowing champions who have been appointed at each NHS board in Scotland? Ideally, you could ask them for a personal view, as they are there because they care about the subject. If you ask them for a view on behalf of the board, it will be quite different from their own reflections.

It might be pertinent to seek the views of Sir Robert Francis. The Scottish Government said that it was going to introduce champions following his report. He might be able to comment.