The moment you sign someone’s contract, you take on their livelihood. That’s not a metaphor, it’s the actual deal. You are now the reason they can pay rent, feed their kids, keep their mortgage, plan a future. And bound up in that, whether anyone says it out loud or not, is a responsibility for their psychological wellbeing while they’re in your care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’ve built entire systems to protect people from being underpaid. We’ve built entire systems to stop them being physically hurt at work. We have a whole system for breaches of employment law. What we haven’t built is anything that protects them from being deliberately, quietly, psychologically and\/or financially destroyed by the people who employ them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know this gap exists because for years, I was standing right inside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you’ve never needed to know this, here’s the short version. There are five main bodies that touch employee protection in the UK, and each one was built to protect something specific:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Fair Work Agency<\/strong> (new as of April 2026) covers minimum wage, holiday pay, and labour exploitation. It’s proactive, it can inspect and compel documents, and it’s still expanding its remit. But its entire universe is pay and exploitation. Nowhere in it is there any concept of how someone was treated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n HSE<\/strong> has stress management standards, and to their credit, they’re finally starting to treat psychosocial risk with the same seriousness as physical safety. But their framework is built for ongoing, foreseeable hazards, workload, role clarity, chronic pressure. It isn’t built to catch a single engineered event: someone praised in November and dismissed in April with nothing in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CQC<\/strong>, in the care sector, does look at leadership and culture as part of its inspections. It asks whether staff feel safe to speak up and whether they believe anything will happen if they do. But that’s where it stops. Enforcement action only follows if residents are found to be at risk, not if staff are being treated badly. A service can fail its own people entirely and stay compliant, as long as nobody receiving care is harmed as a result. It’s loosely connected to what’s needed. It’s nowhere near enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Care Inspectorate<\/strong> in Scotland works the same way, for the same reason, with the same gap. Staff wellbeing gets looked at as a proxy for service quality, never as something worth protecting in its own right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ACAS and the Employment Tribunal system<\/strong> deal with individual disputes, after the fact, and only where a specific legal claim exists, unfair dismissal, discrimination, breach of contract. Neither one investigates the organisation itself, or looks for a pattern across the people who came before you. A company can lose case after case and still never face any scrutiny of why it keeps happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every single one of these was built to protect money, or foreseeable physical safety, or a vulnerable third party, or an employment law breach. None of them were built to protect an employee from psychological harm inflicted by leadership as a deliberate act in itself, or from the financial harm that comes with it, the lost income, the damaged reference, the derailed career, when someone’s livelihood is taken from them this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If that’s happened to you, there is currently nowhere to actually take it. Nothing joins the dots between what happened to you and what happened to the five people before you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the years, in more than one HR role, I have been asked, directly or by clear implication, to do the following. I’m not naming names or companies. I don’t need to. If you’ve worked in HR for any length of time, you already know exactly the kind of room I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been told to “make it happen legally”<\/strong> when leadership had already decided someone was going, before any actual process had begun. My job wasn’t to assess fairly. It was to reverse-engineer a justification for a decision that had already been made in someone’s head. In one case, the exact words from an ops lead were “find a way to get rid of him because he needs to be gone”, no reason given beyond that, no process to point to, just an instruction to make someone disappear and dress it up afterwards. Shockingly, this wasn’t a one-off. The same request came several times, on several different occasions from the same senior leader for no other reason than a dislike of a person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been asked to build a paper trail after the fact.<\/strong> To create the appearance of concerns being raised, conversations being had, warnings being given, none of which actually happened at the time. Manufacturing the exact evidence a fair process is supposed to generate naturally. And to be clear, not to generate notes that should have been taken but were simply overlooked at the time… people forget, that happens and sometimes we do need to go back and make sure we’ve dotted the ‘i’s and crossed the ‘t’s. That’s probably more common than we care to admit… \ud83d\ude0a What I’m talking about here is being asked to fabricate & falsify a paper trail.. huge difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been expected to manage the narrative.<\/strong> To shape how a decision gets told, inside the business and out, so that the real sequence of events never surfaces and the truth never gets told. Destroying someone’s credibility and reputation to save the organisation from having to face the fallout of its true actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been expected to let an innocent person take the blame to protect the guilty.<\/strong> In a care setting, a resident was hospitalised with burns after a thermostatic mixing valve failed, an equipment and maintenance failure, not a moment of human error. The expectation was that a frontline carer would absorb the blame, so the organisation never had to answer for what actually happened. And underneath that, a purely commercial reason: giving the client what they wanted, our carer taking the fall so they didn’t have to, in order to preserve the relationship and keep the contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve watched someone be pushed toward “retirement”<\/strong> they didn’t ask for, because a director wanted an older, slower employee gone faster than a fair process would allow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve watched conduct get stretched into “gross misconduct”<\/strong> when it plainly wasn’t, purely because gross misconduct skips notice, process, and cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve watched a disciplinary policy get rewritten<\/strong>, new examples added into the gross misconduct section, so that one particular person’s situation would now technically fall inside it. Not just misapplying a process. Rewriting the rulebook itself to fit the outcome someone wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve watched someone’s exit get engineered, and their breakdown relabelled as their failing.<\/strong> Publicly humiliated, undermined, pushed to the edge, until they left or fell apart, and then had that exact damage rewritten as a performance or capability issue. Not because that’s what actually happened, but because it made room for someone else, a favourite, a mate, someone leadership simply preferred to have there instead. The person being harmed gets blamed for it. The manipulation behind it, and the people who drove it, never get named, and neither does the real reason it happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every one of these cost me a full time, permanent job, because I said no and walked away rather than do it. That’s not a complaint. It’s the point. If doing the right thing means you can’t stay, something is badly wrong with what “the right thing” is allowed to cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And there was nowhere to actually take any of it. No one to report it to, nothing that would investigate, nothing that would stop it happening to the next person after me. I simply had to leave, and let it carry on without me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s what I think has to exist: a mechanism, entirely separate from grievance procedures and tribunals, because those are exactly the routes this currently falls through. Somewhere a current or former employee can report what happened to them, at any time, without needing to have exhausted anything else first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it needs to be simple. No medical evidence, no jumping through hoops, no proving anything upfront, just a trusted, easily accessed place to say what happened. I know the obvious objection: won’t that get abused? Not really, if the trigger for action is at least three separate reports about the same organisation. A one-off mistake or a single disgruntled employee doesn’t produce a pattern, it produces one report that goes nowhere else. It’s only when the same thing keeps showing up, from more than one person, that it stops being an isolated complaint and becomes evidence of how an organisation actually operates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One more thing worth building in: a report made by, backed by, or directly witnessed by a senior HR professional should carry the weight of two individual reports, not one. If someone whose entire career is built on managing exactly these situations has left an organisation because of the practices, the harm, or the behaviours coming from leadership, that isn’t an ordinary complaint. That’s someone who knows precisely what they’re looking at, walking away from it anyway. That should count for more, not the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those reports build a picture centrally over time. When enough of them point at the same organisation, that triggers a full investigation, document access, interviews with current and former staff, the works. And critically, that reporting route has to be protected from settlement agreements and NDAs, the same way a protected disclosure to a regulator already overrides confidentiality clauses under existing whistleblowing law. Otherwise, every well-resourced employer simply buys the silence that stops the pattern ever being seen. It has to override “protected conversations” and “without prejudice” discussions too, the same conversations currently shielded from an employment tribunal, because those are often exactly where the truth of what really happened gets said out loud. And once an investigation is triggered, it should have access to any ACAS early conciliation communications relevant to the same organisation, since that’s frequently where the earliest, most honest account of a dispute exists, before anyone’s had the chance to reshape it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s another objection worth naming directly: what if a group of employees, unhappy about something like a restructure or a change they simply disagree with, coordinate and each submit an individual report? Here’s the thing, if the organisation has actually done everything right, has followed a fair process, been honest, and treated people decently, that will be exactly what an investigation finds. Nothing to be accountable for means nothing to fear from someone looking closely. And even where an investigation doesn’t uncover deliberate harm, it might still surface practices or processes that could genuinely be improved, which is a useful outcome, not a punitive one. The only organisations with something to fear from this are the ones that know, if someone actually looked, they wouldn’t like what they’d find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it has to reach the individual, not just the company. Right now, there’s no mechanism that even identifies who was responsible for this kind of harm, let alone holds them to it. So the leader who actually drove it never gets named and never answers for it. Financial services has a model for individual accountability. Care has a model for it. There’s no reason employment more broadly shouldn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That accountability needs to run upward too. CEOs, Managing Directors, and business owners need to be accountable for what happens inside their company. When you run a business and that business employs people, those people are trusting you with their livelihoods. They’re trusting that your business won’t leave them worse off, financially, psychologically, or otherwise. That trust can’t be taken lightly. And, it’s a reason to actually pay attention to what you’re allowing to happen under your name, rather than looking away because it’s easier not to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This doesn’t need to be invented from nothing. The Fair Work Agency already exists, already has real powers, and is openly still expanding its remit. This is the piece it’s missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn’t about protecting people from difficult management. Redundancies are hard. Honest feedback is hard. Restructures are hard. Managing performance that genuinely isn’t up to scratch is absolutely necessary. Dismissal is unfortunately necessary sometimes. Dealing with conduct that leaves a lot to be desired needs to done. Discrimination, bullying and harassment needs action. Gross misconduct needs action. And so many more valid concerns that absolutely need to be addressed. None of that is what I’m talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I’m talking about is the gap between some poor person being told they’re doing amazingly and placed on a promotion track in November, and being dismissed in April because supposedly their performance isn’t good enough, with absolutely no indication in between that anything was wrong. That’s not management. That’s a decision dressed up as a process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You take on someone’s livelihood the day you employ them. That should mean something. Right now, for too many people, it doesn’t mean anything at all once someone in leadership decides they’d rather you weren’t there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that needs to change. I’d like to help change it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This might, in some way, make employers realise the true value that HR can actually add, and start taking the profession seriously instead of seeing it as a “necessary evil” and\/or simply a “compliance and admin” function. And it might allow those of us who came into this profession because we believe in making a difference, who believe work can and should be a force for good in people’s lives rather than a place where bullying, manipulation, scapegoating, and outright damaging practices are allowed to happen, to actually do the job we’re passionate about. Without the constant fear that doing the right thing will cost us our own livelihoods and our own wellbeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If this resonates, or if you’ve been asked to do something on this list yourself, I’d love to hear from you. Building the case for why this matters means hearing it isn’t just my story.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The moment you sign someone’s contract, you take on their livelihood. That’s not a metaphor, it’s the actual deal. You are now the reason they can pay rent, feed their kids, keep their mortgage, plan a future. And bound up … Continue reading I know this gap exists because I’ve refused to work inside it<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What we actually need<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Why this matters more than it sounds<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In Closing<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n