Recommendation 8

HM Government · verbatim extract Acknowledged

Disagree. Whistleblowing is one of the six pillars in our safeguarding due diligence framework against which we assess partners before funding them. We published last year a synthesis of the main findings from the central safeguarding enhanced due diligence assessments across 31 civil society organisations. Our due diligence guide makes it clear that the assessment of a potential partner’s enabling of whistleblowing should examine not only whether they have a policy, but also how it operates in practice. We will continue to reiterate this point to our programme teams. Relevant action is taken when the FCDO receives reports that suggest concerns about the whistleblowing practices of a partner. We continue to test private sector suppliers’ adherence to whistle-blowing obligations in the FCDO Supply Partner Code of Conduct. Periodic Central Assurance Assessments of multilateral organisations also look at whistle-blowing. We also continue to draw on other sources of relevant information such as the UN’s Joint Inspection Unit’s assessment of UN whistle-blowing in 2018. So overall we do not agree with the recommendation to carry out a full audit across our hundreds of partners which would be resource intensive, take years to complete and only provide a snapshot of performance. We believe that our current approach of assessing all partners’ whistleblowing capacity before we decide to fund them and our ongoing monitoring of their implementation of whistleblowing practices during the lifetime of that funding is a more efficient and effective way to check that whistle-blowers in organisations we fund are being supported and not retaliated against.