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Coroners have sent the DWP nine Prevention of Future Deaths reports since 2013A company seven weeks old with £100 in the bank won £200m of PPE contractsHMRC disconnected 44,000 callers who had already waited more than an hourUnpaid child maintenance is projected to reach £1bn by March 2031The Loan Charge has been linked to at least ten suicidesThe Covid-19 Inquiry found there was no emergency procurement plan at all
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Standards

Source protection

If you work inside one of the departments we cover, please read this before you send us anything at all.

Before you send anything

  • Use your own device on your own connection. Employer networks and employer-issued laptops are monitored as a matter of routine, and those logs will outlive the conversation by years.
  • Assume documents can be traced back to you. They routinely carry author metadata and edit history, and some systems vary invisible details between copies precisely so that a leaked version can be matched to the person who received it.
  • Think about how many other people had access. If four people could have seen a document then you are one of four suspects, and if only one person could have seen it then you should not send it to us at all.
  • Tell us what you are risking. We will handle a piece differently where publication could identify you, which sometimes means not publishing it in the form you sent it.

What we do

  • We do not publish anything that would identify a source without their explicit agreement.
  • We do not retain contact details beyond what is necessary to work on the story.
  • We will tell you honestly where we think publishing something would expose you, including in the cases where saying so costs us the story entirely.
  • We will not confirm to anybody that you contacted us, and that includes departments, employers and other journalists.

What we cannot do

We cannot give you legal protection that you do not already have. Whistleblowing protection in the UK is considerably narrower than most people assume, and the route you choose affects whether it applies to you at all. Speak to the whistleblowing charity Protect before you act rather than afterwards, because their advice line is free and confidential and it is worth the call even when you feel certain.

Public documents are safer

A great deal of what matters is already in the public domain and simply nobody has read it, including committee evidence, FOI disclosures, published responses to coroners and annual accounts. If you can point us at a public document and tell us what to look for inside it, you take on almost no personal risk and we still get the story.