A councillor has labelled the results of a local authority's whistleblowing survey as being "poor". The Vale of Glamorgan Council's governance and audit committee discussed the results of its staff survey on whistleblowing at a meeting this week. The survey, in which 323 members of staff participated, revealed that only 58% of respondents stated that they were willing to report concerns - a drop from 67% in 2018.
Where respondents gave reasons why they would not be willing to report whistleblowing incidents, a fear of potential consequences for themselves emerged as a common theme. Vale of Glamorgan Council member, Cllr Mark Hooper, said: "The results are pretty poor actually and it has a marked impact on peoples' willingness to want to whistleblow as well, which I think is a scary figure that came out of it."
Data from the findings also revealed that the majority of participants in the survey, 26% of them, were members of staff at schools. The next highest amount of participants by service area were adult services and learning and skills, both at 9% each. Head of Regional Internal Audit Service, Mark Thomas, said: "There has been a huge amount of effort put into trying to promote this in the Vale, probably more so than in many other authorities, but that perhaps hasn't translated into people coming through."
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