Sarah Russell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 May 2025 · Recalled Offenders: Sentencing Limits · Hansard source

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  The Conservatives appear to have forgotten quite a number of things, and I think it might be a good time to remind them. Former Justice Secretary Chris Grayling’s disastrous partial privatisation of the Probation Service was overturned in 2019 after the number of serious offences—including rape and murder—committed by those on probation skyrocketed. Does the Minister agree that we are seeing the long tail of Conservative failure, which overshadows everything that we must do now?

• 15 May 2025 · Solar Farms · Hansard source

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  Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that the Conservatives’ failure to have proper national strategies for development means that we do not have enough prison places to lock up all of our criminals, and that not having sufficient solar energy will do the same?

• 29 Apr 2025 · Criminal Injuries Compensation · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner) for securing this debate. There is an interesting paradox at the heart of this scheme. The fundamental eligibility requirements are that “You must apply as soon as it is reasonably practicable“ and that “this should normally not be later than two years“ after the incident occurred. That is the time limit for adults, which can be extended “due to exceptional circumstances”. If the person was under 18 at the time of the incident, an application must be received by their 20th birthday if the incident was reported to the police before their 18th birthday, or “within two years of the first report to the police, if the incident was reported to the police on or after“ the person’s 18th birthday. I was sexually harassed as a teenager—nothing that would have met a criminal standard—and it never occurred to me to apply for these sorts of things. That is not something that enters the head of someone aged 18, 19 or 20, let alone the victims of child rape and sexual abuse. First, we should accept and implement the recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. That is a basic moral requirement. Secondly, we should look at the “exceptional circumstances” rules, which allow someone who did not manage to apply as soon as reasonably practicable, or within two years, to apply if “due to exceptional circumstances an application could not have been made earlier; and the evidence provided in support of the application means that it can be determined without further extensive inquiries by a claims officer.” That is a much tighter exception than most legal “exceptional circumstances” exception rules. It basically requires that there be no work to do on the part of the agency that would be required to investigate. I do not understand why whether people get compensation is determined by what inquiries a claims officer would be required to make. I do not think that represents justice. Significant numbers of claims are being refused; in 2023-24, nearly 2,000 were refused because they were not submitted within the time limit, and another 765 were refused because of a failure to report as soon as reasonably practicable. What we do not have statistics on, as far as I am aware, is the number of people who do not apply in the first place because they know that they would not meet the eligibility criteria. I suspect that it is substantial. It seems to me that whether someone hears about the scheme in the first place, or can meet the requirements, is very much an accident of their life chances and various other factors. That is no way to determine whether people should receive compensation. At the moment, we are listing Crown court cases for more than two years hence. The police can take more than two years to investigate a crime. About 21% of claims under the criminal injuries compensation scheme take more than two years to conclude; in fact, 2.8% of them take more than five years to conclude. We habitually accept, and have done for some time—although we may not like it—that it can take the state more than two years to deal with a crime, but we do not accept that it can take more than two years for a victim to deal with a crime. That seems, to me, a fundamentally irrational and indefensible position. In this country, we let people make a breach of contract claim six years after the breach of contract occurred, but we will not let them take more than two years to process their trauma. That is not, in my opinion, the right position for the state to take.

• 29 Apr 2025 · Criminal Injuries Compensation · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Gentleman see that there is some irony in his asking why our current Minister has not responded to a 2020 consultation, when his Government, which was in power for another four years, did not do so?

• 29 Apr 2025 · Criminal Injuries Compensation · Hansard source

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  If we create a right to be made aware of the scheme and a claimant can demonstrate that they were not made aware of it, could we amend the rules for exceptional cases reviews so that that automatically counts as an exception?

• 22 Apr 2025 · Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill · Hansard source

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  I have the pre-sentence report guidance in front of me. It says: “When considering a community or custodial sentence, the court must request and consider a pre-sentence report (PSR) before forming an opinion of the sentence, unless it considers that it is unnecessary”. It then goes on to describe various circumstances in which a pre-sentence report might be considered necessary and may “normally be considered necessary”. It does not remove judicial stipulations and interventions completely, and to suggest otherwise is not accurate.

• 22 Apr 2025 · Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 22 Apr 2025 · Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the right hon. Member give way?

• 2 Apr 2025 · Non-disclosure Agreements · Hansard source

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  Members who have heard me speak on these issues before—I do so a lot—know that I am a solicitor specialising in employment law. I am not currently practising, but I spent 13 years doing employment and particularly discrimination law work. A small amount of it was for small employers, but predominantly it was for employees. I have seen a lot of settlement agreements—pretty much every client I ever had ended up with one—and it is extremely unusual for them not to contain some form of NDA. The typical wording states that the person cannot discuss the terms of the agreement, nor the circumstances surrounding the termination of their employment. There are too many difficulties to unpack in seven minutes, but one is that some of the people who put forward the agreements are not solicitors. A lot of businesses have a human resources adviser who is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Many of them are good people who do a good job of providing affordable advice to businesses; I do not want to universally condemn HR consultants. The reality is that at some point they will have been given a precedent settlement agreement by a solicitor—we might be talking 20 years ago—and those agreements contain NDAs, so they are still in widespread use. As a solicitor, I would go back and say, “But if my client can’t say anything about the circumstances concerning the termination of their employment, what are they supposed to say to their new employer when they try to get a new job?” Some employers would agree to negotiate some sort of vague wording such as “left by mutual agreement”, so the person could at least say that, but some of them would just say flat out, “There’s money on the table. Your client can take it or leave it.” But the client faces significant legal bills, and although the employment tribunals were hypothetically designed to enable them to represent themselves, the reality is that if it is a complex discrimination claim and they have a mental health problem—either because their claim related to it in the first place or because they developed one after they were treated so badly in their employment—they may not be able to face the prospect of an unrepresented employment tribunal claim. It is all well and good that the Solicitors Regulation Authority has said that people should not put forward NDA clauses, but they are still in extremely widespread circulation. The flipside is that in order for someone to be persuaded to sign a settlement agreement, there is a requirement that the employer pays for them to have some legal advice. The standard legal advice offer is somewhere between £250 and £500, and for low-paid people the standard is still £250. The reality of the legal market is that no specialist employment lawyer will explain a potentially 20-page legal document to the person, send them follow-up written advice and renegotiate the terms for £250. People on low pay can go to a lawyer who for £250 will perhaps take them through the terms of the agreement and explain what they mean, but then they have run out money, so that is the end of it. The terms are not renegotiated and the person just signs what is put in front of them. Senior execs can often afford the advice, which means they get it fully explained and totally renegotiated, so it is compliant at the end. A solicitor like me working against a solicitor on the other side who has put forward something that does not meet the SRA guidelines will say, “We’re not signing that—you know it’s not compliant. You’re in breach of your professional obligations, now get this off the table.” And they do—swiftly. If a person has £250 and earns £20,000 a year, there is no way that they will pay for that level of top-up legal advice. That is not happening for them at all. Most good solicitors will explain that they cannot do it for the money and tell them how much it will cost to have it done properly. The person will not be able to afford it and, at best, they end up with some really shoddy solicitor who is not necessarily a specialist employment lawyer and is prepared to sign off pretty much anything and, bluntly, leaves them completely stuck. This payment structure is enriching for non-compliant solicitors at best. There is, in theory, legal aid for people who are on very low wages or in receipt of certain benefits and who have equality claims, but that has been paid at such a low rate for such a long time that there are almost no providers whatsoever. Unless we significantly increase the hourly rate that we pay to providers, they will simply continue to hand back their contracts, which is what has happened in the majority of places. It is extremely difficult to access advice unless someone is a trade union member. There are still lots of employers who regard all this stuff as just priced in. I have had clients come to me and say, “He’s absolutely notorious—the chief exec is a complete perv.” Everyone in the organisation knows it, but the board does not care. The board can give the women 20 grand to go away, they sign an NDA and that is the end of that. We have watched the chief exec do that time after time—it is just the cost of doing business. He is regarded as the superstar who brings home the bacon, so no one cares. Those are the fundamentals for many UK employers. At UKFast, for example, the chief exec got done for raping his staff. It had been going on for years: he did not just wake up one morning and do that to one woman. He was notorious in Manchester and lots of people knew what was going on. It happens across different organisations; there is no one specific sector.

• 2 Apr 2025 · Non-disclosure Agreements · Hansard source

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  As I understand it, the whistleblowing provisions in the Employment Rights Bill will let people go to the police or a regulator, but they do not automatically mean that they can go to the media, although they might be able to in some circumstances. If the Minister does not mind my saying so, what he has described is possibly not a blanket solution to the problem.

• 27 Mar 2025 · Modern Slavery Act 2015: 10th Anniversary · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) for securing the debate; I know she is a great champion for these issues. The Global Slavery Index estimates that 122,000 people are living in conditions of slavery in the UK, and over 19,000 victims were referred to the national referral mechanism in the last year alone. My constituency of Congleton is absolutely beautiful, and most of it has a low crime rate by national standards, but this problem is so widespread that it will be occurring in my constituency, because it is occurring everywhere. The figure of 122,000 people is significant; that is roughly one and a half times the number of people in my constituency. We often talk in this Chamber about violence against women and girls. That subject is extremely important, and I will talk about it in the context of modern slavery, but of those who were referred to the national referral mechanism last year, 72% were men. The people most common referred were UK nationals. Children constituted about 31% of referrals. In 48% of those cases, the referral was for criminal exploitation, and about 78% of those referred were boys. It is crucial that we keep up the pressure to reduce and remove violence against women and girls, but it is critical that we are aware of how much violence there still is in society against boys and men. There are lots of different ways in which modern slavery occurs in the UK, and its diversity makes it more difficult to tackle. For men, it often occurs in the agricultural and building sectors, and in takeaways. The growth in the takeaway sector in the UK means that large numbers of takeaways are operating from warehouses, where the workers are completely unseen. Many of them are earning incredibly little. If people can order a takeaway for less money than it would cost to cook the same meal at home, the chances are that that has come about through modern slavery.

• 27 Mar 2025 · Modern Slavery Act 2015: 10th Anniversary · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for drawing that to my attention; I am very interested to hear about it. I am pleased to report that the overwhelming majority of takeaways in my constituency remain physical premises that also operate as restaurants, but I am aware that that is not necessarily the case in the whole of my local authority area, and certainly not across the whole country. I was shocked when I found out about the large number of children, especially boys, who are being referred, and about what is happening. Often, older gang members find vulnerable young boys, some as young as 10 or 11, and ask them to “look after” some drugs for them for a little bit—“Could you just hold them for me, very briefly?” Those gang members will then arrange for those boys to be viciously beaten up. Those boys will then be told that they have lost the drugs and now owe the gang members a whole load of money, and they will be put to work as county lines drug dealers from an incredibly young age. It is an absolutely horrific means of exploiting young boys, particularly vulnerable children, and we need to be as aware of it as we are of the way in which grooming gangs operate around girls. I will move on to how this issue particularly affects women and girls. I will say one thing: I really, really wish that men—it is predominantly men—would stop using prostitutes. Could they just stop? The number of women being brought to the UK under false pretences and believing that they will do a different form of work, then being put to sex work against their will, kept in physically confined situations that they are not allowed to leave and having their passport taken away from them is really significant. The other thing that happens is that some women come here knowing that that might be an element of their work. If they then complain about it or want to stop, they are told that their children back home will be harmed if they do, so they are unable to go to the police when they are being systematically raped. I say to men: please, please stop using prostitutes. I know that Cheshire police are taking all these issues very seriously and doing their best, but the best way to stop us having a market for criminal activity is for people to stop buying criminally traded goods, whether that is vapes, tobacco, drugs or women. The final element of human trafficking I will talk about is in the care sector. Many people in the Chamber have heard me talk about this topic before, so I do not want to labour it, but the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority licensing scheme does not extend to the care sector, so agencies and sponsors are seizing opportunities to exploit other people for their own financial gain. A lot of people in my community receive care paid for either by the local authority, and therefore by the taxpayer ultimately, or with people’s life savings. They would be absolutely horrified if they realised the number of people doing that work who had been trafficked here in the first place. Other hon. Members have mentioned the various organisations working in this area, one of which is Unseen, which talks about regularly speaking on its helpline to members of the care profession who have paid somewhere between £11,000 and £30,000 to get here, when they should not be paying anything other than their own travel expenses. Some 4% of victims have been threatened with either direct personal harm or harm to their family members. Actual, physical harm was reported in 2% of the cases that came to that helpline. Nearly half of victims described confinement or restricted movement. The list of things that have gone on is genuinely, absolutely horrendous. I suggest that when the Fair Work Agency takes over the GLAA’s responsibilities, we ensure that licensing is brought into this sector or otherwise look at how the visa regime can be changed, so that people can transfer between employers, and how we can generally stamp out the level of exploitation in the care sector. I thank everyone who has participated in this debate. I know there is a lot of strong feeling across the House that we can and should do a lot better for vulnerable people in this country.

• 27 Mar 2025 · Modern Slavery Act 2015: 10th Anniversary · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to extend the time limit for challenging “reasonable grounds” decisions? That limit has been reduced to 30 days, which is not long enough to get help from a legal aid lawyer, given the lack of legal aid funding.

• 17 Mar 2025 · Domestic Abuse Offences · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) for speaking so movingly and convincingly. I want to raise the case of a constituent who has come to me with multiple problems to do with her abusive husband. He is not yet her ex-husband, because he is stalling the divorce process, and hiding and dissipating assets. I worked briefly in family law, so I know that this is by no means an unusual situation and that, in most cases, it is the man who is involved in perpetrating this sort of thing. If this was happening in any other situation—for instance, between two business partners—such actions would be prosecuted as fraud, but when pursued through the family court, as they are all the time, they are not prosecuted at all; they are just treated as one of those things. Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 created the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship. An example of coercive or controlling behaviour is economic abuse, including coerced debt, controlling spending and similar activities. However, in this case the husband is no longer directly controlling or coercing the wife because they are separated; he is just spending all of their money and she cannot stop it. Economic abuse that relates to deliberately dissipating someone else’s assets is not really dealt with. Many victims of domestic abuse have their personal finances ruined in the course of their relationships. It is a real problem that any insolvency solution that might help them to rebuild their finances involves having their home address and other personal details published online in the insolvency register. That deters a lot of people from getting involved in the insolvency solutions that would enable them to start to rebuild their finances and their lives. One can apply to withhold the details of addresses and so forth, but that involves paperwork, possible court proceedings and a fee of £300, which is a huge amount of money for someone who is already in an insolvency process. There is a strong argument that we need to reform the process and potentially make the insolvency register private. Finally, I again thank the hon. Member for Eastbourne for securing the debate. I thank Cheshire Without Abuse, which does work in this area in my constituency, and the Money Wellness service, which people can engage with if they are having money difficulties.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Crown Court Backlog · Hansard source

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  In 2016, 120,000 cases were disposed of—concluded—in the Crown courts. That figure was never achieved again by the Conservative party, and by 2022 the figure was 17% lower. Conservative Members like to blame covid for everything, but there were problems in the system well before that. There has been a systematic failure to modernise processes in our courts for years, as we on the Justice Committee hear far too often. What more can we do to use technology to make our courts more efficient and, most importantly, ensure faster outcomes for victims?

• 11 Mar 2025 · Crown Court Backlog · Hansard source

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  19. What steps her Department is taking to reduce the Crown court backlog.

• 11 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The shadow Minister is in danger of misleading the House. Nothing that he has referred to is a crime. Sexual harassment, as dealt with in this Bill, is a civil matter dealt with by tribunal.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Social Media Use: Minimum Age · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I did a lot of research in preparation for my speech today and, as a parent of three primary-age children, what I found really alarmed me. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reports that there were more than 7,000 offences of sexual communication with children last year, which was a significant increase on the year before. It says that typically in those offences, the perpetrators start to talk to children on fairly mainstream web services, and then encourage them to communicate instead on more private messaging services such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram. I was pretty shocked. I did not appreciate that this was such a widespread problem. We all know that if there were 7,000 offences reported to the police, a considerably larger number will have happened. I also discovered the prevalence of dating app use among children. Children experience terrible offences when they go to meet people who were, in fact, adults preying on them. Fundamentally, we need to understand that when we talk about social media, children are a product. If anything that we use on the internet does not cost any money, the gain for the provider is access to our thoughts, feelings and communications—in this case, our children’s thoughts, feelings and communications with their friends. We have a generation now for whose entire lifespan those thoughts, feelings and communications with friends can be monetised and tracked across multiple different websites or social media apps. The complex picture that those companies have of our children is incredibly sophisticated, and their ability to target content at them is like nothing we have ever even imagined. There is also a problem with parents inadvertently facilitating some of this stuff. I would count myself within that description to some extent, so it is certainly not judgmental. When a parent naively says that when a child is 13, they can access something that they would broadly consider uncontroversial—such as WhatsApp so they can chat to their friends—that creates an ageing risk throughout the lifespan of that app use. As was mentioned previously, children subsequently appear to be 16 or 18 before they actually are, and therefore obtain access to services that are unsafe for them much younger than they otherwise would have done. The parents do not appreciate the ageing risk that they are creating, potentially several years down the line. The NSPCC says that we have a fundamental problem. We now have the Online Safety Act, introduced by the Conservatives, and we are working hard as a Government to bring it into force. Ofcom has been given a significant role in looking at child risk assessment by online providers. We all know that if those people had children’s best interests at heart, they would already have done a lot of the things that Ofcom requires. The fact that Ofcom is having to do an investigation into OnlyFans, and its ability or willingness to prevent under-age children from seeing sexualised content, does not sit comfortably—that is the minimum I will say about it. [Martin Vickers in the Chair ] If I am honest, I am not quite sure what the right solution is to those problems. If we do not get societal consensus on the right solution, we will, for instance, carry on seeing parents helping children to circumnavigate age restrictions, and children using VPNs to circumnavigate them themselves. Plenty of teenagers are sophisticated enough to do that. I am not sure what the right answer is. I am not sure that preventing under-16s from accessing such content will solve it. There is a risk that it will create a false sense of security and enable providers of the facilities and apps to say, “Well, under-16s can’t use it. We don’t have to put any safety features in because children are not allowed it anyway.” They will completely abdicate responsibility. It is important that we keep talking about these issues, and that we move forward on a cross-party basis. These are sophisticated problems and I am not sure whether we have a sufficiently sophisticated response to them. The Online Safety Act provides us with a lot of tools, and I can see that its potential fines of 10% of global revenue are quite high. That has the potential to drive some behaviour change, provided the companies involved really see that the tools have teeth. I hope that we will monitor very heavily how Ofcom gets on with the new legislation; I am sure that Members of all parties will be interested in that. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) said that he spoke to his children before the debate to tell them that he was going to raise these issues. I did so with my children over breakfast this morning, and one of them berated me for not having been in her online safety assembly. We have to be realistic about the capacity of both parents and schools to manage these issues without making it a blame game between different organisations—parents versus schools versus major corporations. These corporations have a huge vested interest in exploiting our children, and we have to figure out how better to protect them.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Debt Advice Services · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), who spoke incredibly passionately about the difficulties of debt. There is a lot of debt in my community, which appears, on the face of it, to be relatively affluent, but one of the problems is that people feel a huge compulsion to maintain that appearance. I have spoken to a lot of people on the doorstep, and in the course of the submission that we made as a constituency to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, about the fact that people are really struggling and finding it incredibly difficult. In areas such as mine, where there is not a perception of poverty, there are simply no services to assist people who need help. My constituency has no citizens advice bureau anywhere, no law centre—nothing. When people have difficulties, they therefore do not know where to turn. We need to do the best we can to improve civil legal aid. Citizens advice bureaux were partly funded by local government, which was cut, and partly through the legal advice work they did that was charged at legal aid rates. Unfortunately, since those are now so difficult to work under, all those advice services have been decimated. My local citizens advice bureau spoke to me—I say local; it is not in the constituency, though it can occasionally do some in-person transitory work—about how important it is to see people face to face. It said vulnerable people, older people and others might in theory have online access, but actually cannot go through a complex system to resolve their debt without that consistent face-to-face assistance. We need to aspire not just to improve telephone and online services, but to ensure that in-person advice is provided. My hon. Friend briefly touched on the quality of advice that people are receiving and the fact that although the Financial Conduct Authority regulates the products that people are being sold around debt reduction—they are products—there is a real problem of mis-selling them, despite the theoretical regulation. Unfortunately, regulation is only as good as the enforcement. It is important that we keep discussing the matter and that we bring real change to the advice landscape because our residents need us to.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Violence against Women and Girls · Hansard source

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  I understand that there may be some difficulties with the criminal law in relation to people being followed. In the event that they have been actively harassed and threatened, there is a potential crime in the threat, but there may be a gap in the criminal law for those who are simply followed, with that not being part of a continuing course of conduct. Will the Minister commit to looking into that, please?

• 16 Dec 2024 · Victims of Sexual Violence: Court Delays · Hansard source

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  I understand that there is a specific problem with the criminal injuries compensation scheme as it stands, whereby a claim has to be brought within two years of the original allegation, even though in many cases there has not even been a prosecution by that point. Is that something that the Department is looking at?

• 16 Dec 2024 · Victims of Sexual Violence: Court Delays · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that we keep the blame for the backlogs exactly where it belongs? Defence barristers are doubtless doing the best they possibly can for their clients in some extremely difficult circumstances, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton West (Warinder Juss) says, they are paid poorly relative to other members of their profession. The most significant problems in the court system have been caused by 14 years of chronic Tory underfunding of the court system itself, the Crown Prosecution Service and the prison system, which means that: far too few people are held on remand; people are being bailed when they should not be; people are being dealt with very swiftly to try to deal with custody time limits; and there are so many problems baked into the system as it stands that victims are being wholly failed. We need to ensure the system is invested in and reformed in such a way that those problems do not continue to be exacerbated, one of the most enormous ones being—

• 22 Oct 2024 · Whistleblowing Protections · Hansard source

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  I thank all those who have spoken before me in such an informative manner and to my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) for securing the debate. I have advised numerous whistleblowers throughout my career. Some themes emerge from the experience that speak directly to the points raised by a couple of previous speakers about the impact on whistleblowers when they realise there is something seriously wrong in their organisation and they speak up about it. I have found, particularly in the NHS, that there is an institutional reluctance—and I think I can understand it. I think it is psychologically extremely difficult for people to accept that their department might be systematically failing or sometimes actively damaging patients, and the result is that they tend to turn on the person blowing the whistle and to ostracise them. What follows is an investigation into that person’s behaviour or conduct as relationships deteriorate, and often then a dismissal under the term “some other substantial reason”. There are five potentially lawful reasons for dismissal, including misconduct, incapability and so forth. One is “some other substantial reason” for dismissal. That phrase is really a catchall for, “There is some sort of decent reason for sacking this person”, but the case law has developed in such a way that “some other substantial reason” for dismissal can just be an absolute breakdown of relationships between people who work together—and that is almost always the case where there is a whistleblower. The result is that we have a massive gap in our law, whereby people who have blown the whistle are systematically being dismissed for “some other substantial reason”. One of the most effective things we could do within the scope of the current system would be to outlaw the use of “some other substantial reason” dismissals in a whistleblowing framework, so that if someone has blown the whistle, there cannot be a “some other substantial reason” dismissal. There would still be the ability to dismiss for misconduct if there has genuinely been misconduct, but in the situations I have seen, that has usually not been the case; it is just that people have fallen out. I think there is scope to improve whistleblowing protections in the current system. We could do it through amendments to the Employment Rights Bill, which is making its way through the House. In the longer term—I appreciate that this is not currently fiscally viable—but we could look at extending legal aid to whistleblowers. We could extend to whistleblowers the legal aid protection available to people on low incomes for discrimination claims; that would be in the public interest and would nicely back up the duty of candour that we have been talking about introducing. We could also look at whether the suggestions being made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central could be linked to the fair work agency, and whether we could in due course extend the powers of that agency to examine this issue. It is a terrible thing to advise whistleblowers, because they are so distressed—certainly one of the most distressed client groups I have ever come across. Whistleblowing is typically completely career-ending for them, and the results for many are terrible. We should look at whether our unfair dismissal legislation is well placed to handle such matters. I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central for raising this topic for debate.