I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to restrict the use of non-disclosure agreements; and for connected purposes.
We have some of the best laws and regulations in the world to protect people from bullying, discrimination and abuse in the workplace, yet we allow scurrilous employers to conceal unlawful wrongdoing through the use of non-disclosure agreements, effectively rendering legal protections that we have voted for in this Chamber null and void. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people a year—people we represent—do not have access to proper protection at work because we are allowing employers, through their lawyers and HR professionals, to cover up wrongdoing through an apparently legitimate means: non-disclosure agreements.
Let us be clear from the outset that most employers value and invest in their staff, knowing that they are their most important asset, and most employees never experience the sort of discrimination, bullying and worse that non-disclosure agreements are being used to cover up. It is absolutely right that employees can be required not to divulge confidential information that they have access to in the course of their employment and almost every employment contract should, and would, contain such provisions. But that is not the same as a non-disclosure agreement, which seeks to silence the disclosure of wrongdoing experienced at work. Non-disclosure agreements were invented by lawyers to protect intellectual property, not to create an atmosphere of secrecy in the workplace.
I believe that the use of non-disclosure agreements is driving the wrong culture in the British workplace—a culture where poor management can be covered up and where the silence of employees who have experienced significant wrongdoing can effectively be purchased, even motivating a small number of employees to vexatiously seek payouts from employers by making spurious allegations. We simply have to break this damaging cycle. My Bill would do just that: it would make it a basic principle of our legal system that no one, however powerful, could buy an employee’s silence if there were allegations of wrongdoing in the workplace.
Putting that into practice is not simple. If an employer is willing to cover up even unlawful behaviour with an NDA, what is stopping their putting pressure on employees to withdraw allegations of wrongdoing in return for a pay-out and an NDA never to divulge what has happened? There is a powerful argument to completely ban NDAs for that reason alone, but we need to look to the legal sector to see whether there is a transparent way to resolve that tension. If not, a ban is the only option.
At the moment, non-disclosure agreements are completely unregulated. They can be, and are being, used to attempt to cover up even criminal allegations; they can even include unenforceable conditions to scare employees away from seeking support or redress from the criminal justice system or the employment tribunal system. My Bill would change that by restricting the use of non-disclosure agreements and ensuring that employees could always enjoy the protection of the law as intended.