Public statements clause

If you’re concerned about employees giving interviews to or writing articles to be published in the media, or about ex-employees making disparaging statements to the media once they’ve left employment, insert our public statements clause into their written statement of employment particulars.

Limiting media contact

The benefit of having a Public Statements Clause is that you can try to control what an employee is saying or writing publicly and to whom. In many cases, you won’t have a problem with an employee giving an interview etc. to the media as long as you’ve approved the subject matter of what they’re going to discuss (after all, it could be good marketing for your business), but what you want to prevent is employees exceeding their authority and potentially damaging your business reputation with disparaging, inappropriate or incorrect remarks or breaches of confidentiality. Our clause provides that an employee must obtain your prior written authority before accepting an interview request from a member of the media, accepting a public speaking engagement or agreeing to write any copy or article for publication or broadcast anywhere and that your prior written permission is also needed for the contents of any such speech, lecture, article or other material to be broadcast or published. Our clause then goes on to prohibit both employees and ex-employees from making or publishing statements or remarks to the media about the company or your current or former employees, officers, consultants, contractors, agents, clients, customers, suppliers, shareholders or advisors without prior written clearance. 

whistleblowing

Contractually, you can’t limit an employee’s right to make a protected disclosure under the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 and therefore we’ve provided that our clause doesn’t prevent the employee from making such a disclosure. You also shouldn’t prevent, impede or deter an employee from reporting an offence to a law enforcement agency e.g. the police, co-operating with a criminal investigation or prosecution or reporting misconduct or a serious breach of regulatory requirements to a regulator who is responsible for supervising or regulating the matters in question, so we’ve covered those too.