SEVEN WHISTLEBLOWERS. ONE DEAD WOMAN. ONE KNIGHTHOOD FOR THE MAN WHO IGNORED THEM
In 1999, seven care workers at a BUPA care home in Bromley reported abuse of vulnerable elderly residents.
They followed every rule. They submitted formal evidence. They did everything the law required.
Edna had no family. She was entirely defenceless. Seven people risked everything to speak up for her.
Every one of them lost their job.
Edna died.
The man who received the evidence and chose to act on none of it became Sir Des Kelly OBE, a government advisor on elderly care, head of the National Care Forum, and a welcome contributor to CQC
@CareQualityComm policy on the very sector where his inaction let an abuser harm more people.
You genuinely cannot make this up.
These seven became known as the BUPA7. They were the first people in UK history to use the Public Interest Disclosure Act (PIDA), the law that was supposed to protect whistleblowers. The law that failed them so badly that other workers across the country saw what happened and quietly decided it was safer to say nothing.
That silence has cost lives. It still does.
Eileen Chubb
@CompassnInCare, one of the BUPA7, has spent every year since building Compassion in Care and supporting over 13,000 whistleblowers. She has seen the exact same pattern repeat itself across the NHS, social care, finance, construction, and local government.
Report wrongdoing. Lose your job. Watch the wrongdoing continue untouched.
Even if a whistleblower wins at an employment tribunal under PIDA, nobody is legally required to fix the problem they reported. The abuse can just carry on. The risks remain. The tribunal hands out a payout and everyone goes home.
Mid Staffs. Gosport. Rotherham. Bristol Babies. Winterbourne View. In every single one of these cases, someone knew. Someone spoke up. And the system destroyed them for it while the wrongdoing continued.
Robert Francis produced his Freedom to Speak Up review in 2015. Joint investigations by Compassion in Care and
@PrivateEyeNews later revealed that the CQC
@CareQualityComm lied to the public for years, falsely claiming it had closed 100 care homes when the real number was two.
The same CQC had invited Des Kelly's input into its policy on the sector he had already failed so catastrophically.
Nothing meaningfully changed.
Eileen Chubb is calling for Edna's Law. A law that would make it a criminal offence to ignore a genuine whistleblower, put wrongdoers in front of a criminal court instead of an employment tribunal, protect whistleblowers as protected witnesses, and force corrective action on the actual wrongdoing.
The State would prosecute. Not the whistleblower, who is currently expected to become a legal expert and fight experienced barristers alone.
The petition has 7,417 signatures. It has been running for a while.
It is addressed to Sir Keir Starmer
@Keir_Starmer.
If you want to protect the public, you protect the people willing to protect the public.
Sign the petition. Share it. Write to your MP.
Because the alternative is just waiting for the next inquiry. The next preventable scandal. The next name we will all say we should have done something about.
Sign the petition
change.org/p/protect-the-proโฆ