Whistleblowing form

Our form has been drafted to enable your employees and other workers to easily raise any qualifying disclosures with you under the terms of your whistleblowing policy.

Disclosure method

While the law provides no set method through which a worker must make a qualifying disclosure, it’s good practice to encourage all reports to be made internally in the first instance and to provide a form for workers to complete setting out the details of their disclosure. This is the purpose of our Whistleblowing Form.

Qualifying disclosures

Qualifying disclosures are disclosures of information which the worker reasonably believes are made in the public interest and tend to show one or more of the following relevant failures is either currently happening, took place in the past, or is likely to happen in the future:

• a criminal offence, including offences such as theft, fraud or acts of bribery
• the breach of a legal obligation
• a miscarriage of justice
• a danger to the health and safety of any individual
• damage to the environment
• deliberate concealment of information tending to show any of the above five matters.

For a qualifying disclosure to then be a protected disclosure, the worker needs to make it to the right person and in the right way, but qualifying disclosures made to you as the employer will always be protected.

Form benefits

Providing a form for the worker to complete to provide details of their disclosure means that you will hopefully obtain the required information from them upfront. Our form envisages that the worker will state the relevant category of their disclosure, e.g. a criminal offence, and then provide further details of the issue, including the dates and times when the alleged wrongdoing took place, where it happened and who was involved, including both perpetrators and witnesses. It also allows the worker to outline what action they would like to see taken to resolve the issue. The use of a form should also enable you to quickly identify an issue as a formal whistleblowing disclosure, thus triggering an investigation under the terms of your Whistleblowing Policy. We’ve made it clear in our form that personal grievances, such as complaints about breaches of an employee’s own employment contract, should be raised under the grievance procedure instead, as the form is for genuine public interest disclosures only.