Supply of a confidential whistleblowing hotline service to BEIS

Notice summary: To provide a confidential telephone hotline service for BEIS employees to raise whistleblowing concerns, reporting the concerns to named contacts in BEIS and named organisations within the wider BEIS family, and providing the BEIS Contract Manager with management information as required.

Description: The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has a clear and robust "Whistleblowing and Raising a Concern" policy, for use by our employees. The policy includes information on the different potential avenues available to whistleblow or raise a concern.

To ensure that we are able to maintain confidentiality wherever possible we currently purchase the use of an external confidential whistleblowing telephone line for employees of BEIS and some of our main Partner Organisations (all part of the BEIS "family") as one of the reporting avenues.

The contract with our current hotline supplier ends on 10 July 2020 and we would like to continue to provide a hotline service to our employees going forward once the current contract ends.

The contract would be with BEIS but would also cover employees in some of our Partner Organisations - all part of the BEIS "family". Just under 12,000 users have access to the current hotline.

Reports of calls will need to be sent to different people (Nominated Officers) in each of the areas of the BEIS family covered by this contract, depending on who is raising a concern. There are approximately 12 Nominated Officers across the BEIS family.

As an indication of call volume, there have been less than 5 calls to the current hotline in the current contract year. The call volume is subject to variance.

The role of the hotline contractor is to report any calls it receives to the client; it is not to address/investigate the concerns raised by callers.