Ignoring whistleblowers has cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds, new analysis has found, with the cost of three recent scandals alone pegged at 426m.

A report published today by the whistleblowing charity Protect has laid bare the cost of failing to act when whistleblowers speak up.

It looked at three major scandals in recent years: the Post Office IT Horizon scandal; the Lucy Letby scandal; and the 2018 collapse of the oursourcing giant Carillion.

It calculated the costs associated with the Carillion scandal – in which the UK’s second-largest construction company was plunged into compulsory liquidation in January 2018, despite the Cabinet Office having no indication it was not in sound financial health six months earlier – at 209m. Carillion held around 420 public sector contracts when it went under.

The report notes that warnings about improper accounting practices from a member of staff, Emma Mercer, had little effect. Her repeated warnings were ignored, except for the company’s auditors, KPMG, being told to re-audit its own work, “effectively marking [its] own homework”. And when Mercer became Carillion’s finance director in September 2017 – having raised concerns about its finances in spring that year – the company’s “fate as a soon-to-be ex-construction giant had already been sealed”, the report says.

A select committee report into the collapse found Carillion’s board and executive members were “uninterested in hearing inconvenient truths about the...

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