New NDA legislation set to shatter the culture of silence
Read more:
Among the most significant of these changes is an amendment currently progressing through the UK legal system: a reform to the Employment Rights Bill which focuses squarely on the use – and misuse – of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
Historically, NDAs served a clear and legitimate purpose. They were designed to protect sensitive business information such as intellectual property, trade secrets, or commercial strategy.
But over time, their use has drifted beyond this original intent, and increasingly, NDAs have been used to draw a line under disputes involving allegations of workplace harassment, bullying, and discrimination.
In some cases, that use risks silencing victims or witnesses of harassment or discrimination, leaving them unable to speak about their experiences, even to friends or family. This is where the changes seek to end their misuse to conceal misconduct or criminal acts.
Read more:
Building on the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality) Act 2024, which introduced a proactive duty on employers to prevent harassment, the proposed new legislation aims to make void any NDA that seeks to gag individuals from speaking out about inappropriate behaviour. That includes clauses in settlement agreements and employment contracts which have traditionally served to keep such allegations confidential.
The shift is seismic, both legally and culturally. At its core, this legislation reasserts what many have argued all along: that no one should be contractually forbidden from reporting abuse or discrimination. Victims and witnesses must be able to speak openly without fear of retaliation or legal consequence.
The timing of this reform is no coincidence, with the last few years having seen a reckoning across multiple sectors including retail, entertainment, politics and tech, where high-profile figures have faced serious allegations of misconduct. In many cases, NDAs were reported as instrumental in suppressing these claims for years, allowing harmful behaviours to persist unchecked.
With that backdrop, the reform is about more than just legal compliance. It reflects a growing public consensus that transparency and accountability are non-negotiable in modern workplaces, removing a potential route that retains a culture of silence.
Read more:
But as with all sweeping changes, this one is not without its cautions, as some legal experts and advocates for victims have expressed concern that a blanket restriction on NDAs could, unexpectedly, negatively impact those it aims to protect. For some individuals, confidentiality is not a muzzle but a shield, providing the comfort of a private path to closure.
Removing the option entirely may limit choices for victims who don't wish their most vulnerable moments to become public knowledge. As the legislation takes shape, lawmakers and employers will have to strive to strike the right balance: preserving the right to speak out whilst also allowing those who want privacy a means to achieve it.
Employers are currently required not only to respond appropriately to allegations but to demonstrate that they have created a working environment where harassment and discrimination are not just dealt with, but also that they have actively put preventative measures in place. If they fail to do so they will no longer be able to rely on NDAs to avoid adverse publicity and reputational damage. The emphasis here is to shift from reactive crisis management to proactive culture-building.
For organisations, this is a moment of reckoning. Reputational, legal, and ethical stakes are high and, in an age where trust and transparency are paramount, failing to evolve is not an option.
Paul Sheerin is chief executive of Scottish Engineering.
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New Statesman
4 days ago
- New Statesman
GMB chief Gary Smith: 'Oil and gas is not the enemy'
Illustration by Ellie Foreman Peck Gary Smith is not a man who disguises his passions. The wall of his office features framed pictures of pioneering Scottish trade unionists, the Durham Miners' Gala, steam ferries on the Mersey, the jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron, and Hibernian FC. As the general secretary of the GMB – the country's third-largest trade union, with around 630,000 members – the blunt, puckish Scotsman leads an organisation that is more central to national life today than it has been for decades. Its parliamentary group alone comprises more than 250 Labour MPs (making it, as Smith likes to quip, over twice the size of the Conservative Party), including Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner. GMB's presence in sectors such as defence, energy and manufacturing means that cabinet ministers heed its voice. 'It's a huge improvement on what went before, impossible to compare it,' said Smith, 57, with a thatch of boyish blond hair. We met in Euston, central London, at the GMB's national office, Mary Turner House (named after the indomitable Irishwoman who served as the union's president for 20 years). Smith praised the government's rescue of British Steel, its defence industrial strategy, the commitment to build the Sizewell C nuclear plant and the 'transformative' Employment Rights Bill. 'Has the government made mistakes?' Smith asked. 'Yeah, absolutely, and we have been outspoken in our criticism about winter fuel payments. Nobody said there shouldn't have been reform of payments; it was just badly handled. Likewise, on disability benefits, we were very worried about the poorest and most vulnerable – many of our people who are in work get Pip payments.' Smith, who was elected general secretary four years ago, has often been an ally to Starmer when it's mattered most. At the 2021 Labour Party Conference it was post-midnight conversations with Smith in Brighton hotel suites that convinced Starmer and his chief aide, Morgan McSweeney, that they had the votes required to rewrite the party rule book and marginalise the Corbynite left. But Smith is unsparing in his criticism of Labour's first year in office. 'The big thing that is missing is a clear vision about the future. What we need is a sense of national mission and I don't think that's there. I don't think we've got that emotionally compelling story about the future of the country. 'We are emerging into a new world order as well. That's very difficult for any government to navigate. This is a new epoch that's opened up in front of us: the end of globalisation, the end of neoliberalism. Any government's got to wrestle with what Britain's place in the world is going to be.' He added: 'It frustrates me that the right-wing press accuse[s] Labour of talking down Britain. I think in many ways people are underestimating the state the country's in. Our finances are precarious, we've seen that in the past few weeks. We are beholden to the bond markets; this could unravel very quickly. The country's in a really difficult situation and so I don't envy what they've had to inherit.' (The Office for Budget Responsibility's recent report warned that the UK had the sixth-highest debt, fifth-highest deficit and third-highest borrowing costs of the 38 OECD countries.) This year Donald Trump has become the unlikely hero of some US unions, with the United Auto Workers praising his tariffs as necessary to 'end the free-trade disaster'. Smith invoked the US New Right – and its embrace of protectionism over Reaganism – several times during our conversation. 'The New Right saw an opportunity with working-class communities hollowed out by globalisation. We can talk about average GDP, we can talk about how many people in the globe got wealthy. There were a whole number of our communities that were absolutely abandoned. 'People were told that they're competing in this global labour market and the jobs went abroad and that left people embittered, angry and absolutely disoriented. And the New Right in America got this – they certainly got it better than the liberal left did.' To some this will sound reminiscent of Blue Labour, the party's economically interventionist and socially conservative faction. (Its founder, Maurice Glasman, was the sole Labour parliamentarian invited to Trump's inauguration.) But Smith bridled at the comparison. 'I'm not being critical of anybody but we're not Blue Labour. Why do we have to stick badges on things all the time? We're a working-class organisation; we spend a lot of time listening to our members. So I'm not interested in fashionable factions in the Labour Party, I'm just interested in listening to working-class people, and our members have been telling us this for a long time. They are tired of low-paid, insecure employment. That was a Tory economic model. 'You know, we got to a point in Barrow where we couldn't build nuclear submarines. The only growth industry was heroin, and that happened under Cameron and Osborne. So what shapes our world-view is not some factional philosophy in Labour – it's just listening to working-class people and our membership.' Unite, the UK's second-largest union, this month vowed to 're-examine' its affiliation to Labour and excoriated the party's record in office, with union representatives since surveyed on the matter. 'It's up to Unite what they do. We're not interested in what other unions do,' Smith replied diplomatically when I raised the subject. 'For us, a relationship with government should be contentious, there should be disagreement and debate. But I'd much rather have a Labour government in power than the alternative. And let's be clear about the Tories – they're done – the alternative is going to be Reform.' What does Smith believe is fuelling Farage's ascendancy? 'This is a fuck-you vote, people are just angry: they're pissed off and they're looking for somebody to kick. A lot of this ultimately is about declining living standards. We're a country where in our towns and communities people just look beat. You live in a city like London and even if you're on a good wage you're struggling to keep your head above water… Farage is feeding off that anger and frustration and decline.' In recent months, Farage has reframed Reform as 'the party of working people', speaking of his desire for a 'sensible relationship' with the trade unions and vowing to reopen the Port Talbot steelworks. But Smith – precisely the kind of earthy general secretary whose endorsement Farage would relish – is unimpressed. 'I think he's a chancer. He is no friend of trade unions or working-class people. Peel back the rhetoric: where was he on the Employment Rights Bill? He's voted against working people at Amazon having the right to organise and collectively bargain over their pay. He's voted against people having stronger collective rights at work, which will allow us to better redistribute wealth in this country.' Smith ridiculed Farage's claim that he was appalled by Michael Heseltine's closure of coal mines as Conservative trade and industry secretary in the 1990s. 'Do you think he went on picket lines and supported the miners? Do you think he argued for the steel workers? No, he was a metal trader in the City of London, lifting another glass of Champagne as all this devastation of UK industry and communities went on.' Gary Smith was born in Edinburgh in 1967; his father was an electrician and his mother a bookmaker's clerk. He became a Scottish Gas apprentice at the age of 16 (the GMB later paid for him to study at Ruskin College, and he gained a Master's degree in industrial relations from Warwick University). His political consciousness was shaped by the fraught social conflicts of the early Thatcher era. 'I saw working-class people and communities getting treated very badly,' he said. 'I get so angry when I listen to people talk fondly about the Thatcher era because a lot of kids didn't get off the housing estates. It was mass unemployment, cheap heroin, and HIV/Aids. There's a whole generation of young men who died and never made it through that period.' Four decades on, Smith is once more haunted by the spectre of deindustrialisation. He spoke of a recent encounter with an oil and gas worker moved to tears in Middlesbrough ('big guy, really impressive guy') who declared at a town hall meeting: 'They're doing to us what they did to Middlesbrough in the 1980s.' For this, Smith attributes much blame to the UK's net zero policy of which he is the fiercest Labour critic. 'For too long, we were exporting jobs and importing virtue, so we closed down British industry. That was great for emissions, not great for communities. Our notional emissions have fallen but all we've done is export jobs and industry to China, where they burn coal to produce the goods we then import on diesel-burning barges and ships – and that includes the vast bulk of all renewables industry.' Though he emphasises that he is not a climate change denier – 'We're not in the same place as the US New Right' – he believes that current energy policy is a gift to Farage. 'We have been decarbonising through deindustrialisation and it's counterproductive because the communities that have seen their industries closed down, they've been abandoned and will end up voting for the right, and exactly the way that they have in America.' Smith fears that the political ramifications of net zero could be greatest of all in his native Scotland – he lives in Paisley – where Labour aims to prevent the SNP winning a fifth term next May. 'On the current policies, I don't believe that Labour can win in Scotland,' he warned of the government's decision to ban new North Sea oil and gas licences. 'People don't get that energy is an emotional issue in Scotland. We went hundreds of miles out in this inhospitable sea and built this incredible, groundbreaking energy infrastructure. 'If you're on the west coast of Scotland, most people of a certain age have a drop of oil from Sullom Voe because there are so many families who were involved in building that project when they landed the oil in Shetland. This was an emotional story about Scotland. It's important to its sense of self and the economy, and I don't think people have really got that.' While Starmer is expected to grant permission to the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea – which are exempt as existing licences – he has consistently reaffirmed the ban on new ones. 'That is absolutely our position,' he recently declared (a stance that Trump publicly derided ahead of his planned meeting with Starmer in Aberdeen). Does Smith believe that Labour will ultimately be forced to rethink its policy? 'They will have to rethink it because the consequences in terms of energy prices, in terms of national security, in terms of the economy and jobs, are so profound. What we should be doing is taking a public stake in what is left of the oil and gas sector and using the profits for that sector, or part of them, to invest in a new green future. We should be talking about North Sea Two, how we're going to collaborate with Norway – not just decarbonising the North Sea, but what comes next. Oil and gas is not the enemy: it's actually the gateway to whatever comes next, and we've got to stop seeing it as a threat.' The GMB's stances have often put it at odds with the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband – who has championed net zero as the 'economic opportunity of the 21st century' – but Smith hints at something of a rapprochement: 'I hope and think that Ed realises that in haemorrhaging jobs through this charge to net zero, the political consequences could be very, very profound for Labour. I get a sense that he's starting to listen and I think he also knows that a lot of these new, fashionable green companies are vehemently anti-union. 'And that's a huge problem because it's completely at odds with the government's agenda. Sea Wall in the North East – we're fighting for recognition there and have a strike ballot – they've had access to tens of millions of pounds of government funding and they're anti-union. Octopus Energy? Anti-union.' We return to Labour's future. Even those who sympathise with Starmer often say they do not know what he stands for ('There is no project,' one loyalist MP recently told me). 'If I'm honest with you, I don't think we've clearly defined what Starmerism is,' Smith said. 'There's huge opportunities post-globalisation and post-neoliberalism. How do we grasp those? 'Keir has done some really good stuff on the international stage. But we need to have a national mission and people need to believe again that there is a brighter tomorrow. Labour does need to be that light on the hill.' Just a year into government, cabinet ministers already speculate about whether Starmer will fight the next election. Does that surprise Smith? 'I always said that people underestimated him – let's see. He's got a huge and really tough job but people have underestimated him before. I never thought I'd see a Labour government again in my working life; Keir was part of the team that delivered that extraordinary election result last year and I think he deserves a bit of credit and a bit of time. If they end up all just turning on each other, stabbing each other in the back, it'll just be electoral disaster for them.' [See more: Can Nigel Farage have it both ways?] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
The Herald Scotland
7 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
New NDA legislation set to shatter the culture of silence
Fast forward to today, and whilst the machinery of industry has evolved dramatically, the need for fair treatment and worker protection remains as relevant as ever. Supporting companies by advising and guiding in the application of employment law and HR best practice remains a key pillar of what we do, and once again this year our team have been busy ensuring our members are updated for the changes that they will want to make sure they are on top of. Read more: Among the most significant of these changes is an amendment currently progressing through the UK legal system: a reform to the Employment Rights Bill which focuses squarely on the use – and misuse – of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Historically, NDAs served a clear and legitimate purpose. They were designed to protect sensitive business information such as intellectual property, trade secrets, or commercial strategy. But over time, their use has drifted beyond this original intent, and increasingly, NDAs have been used to draw a line under disputes involving allegations of workplace harassment, bullying, and discrimination. In some cases, that use risks silencing victims or witnesses of harassment or discrimination, leaving them unable to speak about their experiences, even to friends or family. This is where the changes seek to end their misuse to conceal misconduct or criminal acts. Read more: Building on the Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality) Act 2024, which introduced a proactive duty on employers to prevent harassment, the proposed new legislation aims to make void any NDA that seeks to gag individuals from speaking out about inappropriate behaviour. That includes clauses in settlement agreements and employment contracts which have traditionally served to keep such allegations confidential. The shift is seismic, both legally and culturally. At its core, this legislation reasserts what many have argued all along: that no one should be contractually forbidden from reporting abuse or discrimination. Victims and witnesses must be able to speak openly without fear of retaliation or legal consequence. The timing of this reform is no coincidence, with the last few years having seen a reckoning across multiple sectors including retail, entertainment, politics and tech, where high-profile figures have faced serious allegations of misconduct. In many cases, NDAs were reported as instrumental in suppressing these claims for years, allowing harmful behaviours to persist unchecked. With that backdrop, the reform is about more than just legal compliance. It reflects a growing public consensus that transparency and accountability are non-negotiable in modern workplaces, removing a potential route that retains a culture of silence. Read more: But as with all sweeping changes, this one is not without its cautions, as some legal experts and advocates for victims have expressed concern that a blanket restriction on NDAs could, unexpectedly, negatively impact those it aims to protect. For some individuals, confidentiality is not a muzzle but a shield, providing the comfort of a private path to closure. Removing the option entirely may limit choices for victims who don't wish their most vulnerable moments to become public knowledge. As the legislation takes shape, lawmakers and employers will have to strive to strike the right balance: preserving the right to speak out whilst also allowing those who want privacy a means to achieve it. Employers are currently required not only to respond appropriately to allegations but to demonstrate that they have created a working environment where harassment and discrimination are not just dealt with, but also that they have actively put preventative measures in place. If they fail to do so they will no longer be able to rely on NDAs to avoid adverse publicity and reputational damage. The emphasis here is to shift from reactive crisis management to proactive culture-building. For organisations, this is a moment of reckoning. Reputational, legal, and ethical stakes are high and, in an age where trust and transparency are paramount, failing to evolve is not an option. Paul Sheerin is chief executive of Scottish Engineering.
Scottish Sun
7 days ago
- Scottish Sun
Women nearing retirement to get £5,000 a year less in private pension income than men, experts warn
Four in ten workers are under-saving for their golden years PENSION INEQUALITY Women nearing retirement to get £5,000 a year less in private pension income than men, experts warn Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) WOMEN nearing retirement can expect to get £5,000 a year less in private pension income than men, experts say. Fresh analysis shows they will typically receive around £100 per week compared to a little over £200 a week for blokes. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 2 People deserve to know they'll have a decent income in retirement — but the truth is that is not the reality facing many, said Liz Kendall The greater likelihood of a history of part-time jobs and caring responsibilities may contribute to women getting less. Resulting lower National Insurance contributions could also curtail their state pension. The introduction of automatic pension enrolment from 2012 has helped women and men, the experts insist. But retirees in 2050 are predicted to have £800 — eight per cent — less private pension income than those today. Meanwhile, four in ten workers — nearly 15million — are under-saving for their golden years, with low earners and the self-employed hit the hardest, research shows. The Government will today revive the Pension Commission to address the findings. Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall said: 'People deserve to know they'll have a decent income in retirement — but the truth is that is not the reality facing many. 'The Pensions Commission laid the groundwork, and now, two decades later, we are reviving it to tackle the barriers that stop too many saving in the first place.' The British Chambers of Commerce said that any costs to businesses on top of National Insurance contributions and the Employment Rights Bill would have to be 'gradual'. And they must be paused if economic conditions worsen, giving businesses time to adjust to increased costs, it added. Rain Newton-Smith, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said there must be a consensus in business, Government and society that the system is affordable for employers and workers. Pension expert on how to retire early- Scotish Widows
