My Lords, I understand from the Government’s statement and from what the Minister has said that the intention is to ensure that people who ought to be covered by the Act in future will in fact be covered. What bothers me about it, however, is Clause 4, which gives the Secretary of State the right to make amendments as to what individuals count as workers for the purpose of this part. It seems to me that that leaves the whole thing fairly wide open as far as the Government are concerned: they would be able to introduce secondary legislation to indicate that some people are workers and other people are not workers. That is a bit of a difficulty as far as we are concerned.
As far as the clause itself is concerned, it had been my intention to move that it should be opposed, mainly because the TUC’s view is that the wording as it now exists in the Bill introduces a public interest test into whistleblowing rights and, for such claims to succeed, the employee will have to demonstrate that he believed that disclosure was in the public interest and that this belief was reasonable in the circumstances. The view of the TUC was that this would limit the protection that employees have in raising concerns about health and safety issues at work. The Law Society also has doubts about this clause. For these reasons I intended to oppose the clause. However, my noble friends have further amendments which we are due to discuss and which I think will deal with some of the problems that some of us have with this clause.
Of course, I am sure that the Minister will appreciate that it is very important to ensure that workers, particularly those working in very dangerous environments, do not have any restrictions about whether or not they may raise problems they have about health and safety at work. I can remember my own union being very much involved with this many years ago when there was the awful accident at Piper Alpha in the offshore oil industry, in which a number of workers were killed. We discovered on investigation that a number of individuals working there had short-term contracts and, because they had short-term contracts, they were very reluctant to warn about the kind of issues that
were of concern to them about safety and so on because they feared that they would not have their short-term contracts renewed.
There is a case for looking at the way that this clause in the present legislation works to ensure that we do cover everybody who might have the possibility of drawing attention to possible dangers in their working environment. We must be absolutely certain that they are not prevented in any way from raising those particular issues. I will not, this evening, be pressing the opposition to the whole clause, but I certainly think that we need to look at it very thoroughly before the legislation leaves us.