We are delighted and honoured to welcome Edward Romain to WhistleblowersUK and thank him for accepting the role of Chair of the Legal Panel.
Last week Edward topped the Amazon best sellers list in the legal self help category ahead of many leading authors and personalities and will be bringing his vast experience to support whistleblowers and our campaign for an Office of the Whistleblower.
In accepting this post Edward said:
“People do not usually lose because they are wrong. They lose because the process outlasts them.”
He went on to say:
“In my experience whistleblowers are universally shortchanged by the system that is supposed to protect them. Their reward for doing the right thing is often to pay over and again. They find that speaking up was only the beginning. What follows turns less on the merits of whether they were right to speak up, but on whether they can carry a case through a system that is designed to wear them down.”
“That is why I am proud to be joining WhistleblowersUK as chair of its Legal Panel and look forward to bringing my experience as a whistleblower and litigator to help others and put my weight, and that of Blind Justice UK behind the campaign for an Office of the Whistleblower.
I have watched this organisation go from strength to strength by standing up against opposition and holding the line in Parliament over many years. WhistleblowersUK stand up for people most of the country never hear about and I am glad to be joining a team that unwaveringly keeps its nerve long after others give up.
WhistleblowersUK and Blind Justice UK have agreed to work in partnership to improve access to justice for whistleblowers. WhistleblowersUK will continue to lead campaigning, policy and legislative reform and Blind Justice will take the lead on casework and evidence gathering. Together we provide consistent, professional and considerate support to whistleblowers and meaningful whistleblowing research.
The legal panel will triage and assess cases, help whistleblowers organise evidence and prepare their own documents providing a guiding hand and sounding board. (Psychological and practical peer to peer support will continue to be led by Dr Peter Harvey and his team.)
WhistleblowersUK will not conduct litigation, act as advocates or provide regulated legal advice. Where someone needs those services, we will say so and signpost them to an appropriately regulated adviser.
I am passionate about this cause as I can relate to the challenges facing whistleblowers having been an unrepresented litigant myself, so I will not pretend to be neutral about any of this!”
About Blind Justice UK
Blind Justice spent two years auditing outcomes for people going through courts and tribunals without a lawyer. Our research concluded that documents were missing or unprocessed in 92 per cent of cases. In 85 per cent, submissions required to reach the person making the decision never got there. We concluded that having a good case was not enough – It was about whether the litigant could get that case through the system intact.
The Justice Select Committee (JSC) published that work, and since January we have published ten further reports on how the legal system and its regulators behave in practice. Regulators have answered the JSC in writing drawing a minister into the debate!
Why Blind Justice has joined forces to support the campaign for an Office of the Whistleblower.
Currently proposals keeps meeting the same problem not least because of political volatility and changes to key personnel. Namely people with the power to change the law are asked to accept, largely on trust, that whistleblowers are broken by the process rather than beaten on the facts. Individual cases reach the newspapers, and too often these cases are dismissed as exceptions.
In my new role I will we will be building a systematic record of what happens to a person between the moment they speak up to the end of the process and what happens next. This is a long term commitment.
We are going to develop a new system using technology and our unique experience and expertise to support litigants in person – supported by Parliamentarians. Our system will collect and anonymise data using binding safeguards over how information is used and shared for the greater good. This connects with the wishes of whistleblowers who say the one compelling reason they spoke up is to stop others from goin through the same experience.
We are going to turn the process on its head so that whistleblowers do not have to take potluck hoping the process does what it is supposed to do. Not relying on what a policy says should happen, but having greater insight and control enabling them to make informed decisions case by case.
This work will reinforce the evidence collected in the 2019 call to evidence conducted by WhistleblowersUK for the APPG and improve the argument for reform – providing new cohorts of politicians with evidence that assists policy making and removes dependancy on individual anecdotes.
It is our shared ambition to ensure that every citizen can access justice and turn over the lottery system that currently exists. We want it to become impossible for somebody to lose a case they should have won because nobody helped them understand the process or put the right document in the right place on the right day!
For whistleblowers, that matters profoundly. They have already paid once for telling the truth.
“Whistleblowers should not have to pay again to be heard.”
