The appellant was appointed a district judge in 2006. In 2011 she voiced a number of concerns about the effect of budget cuts on the courts, in particular about the lack of appropriate and secure courtroom accommodation, administrative failures and the severely increased workload of district judges, and eventually raised a formal grievance. She claimed that, as a result, she suffered a number of detriments, including being seriously bullied and ignored and undermined by her fellow judges and court staff. She contended that her complaints were ‘qualifying disclosures’ for the purposes of section 43B of the Employment Rights Act 1996. The issue of principle was whether a district judge was a ‘worker’ or a ‘person in Crown employment’ for the purposes of the protection given to whistle-blowers under Part IVA of the 1996 Act. The Supreme Court held unanimously that those provisions of the Act (and the parallel provisions in the Employment Rights (Northern Ireland) Order 1996, as amended) should be read and given effect so as to extend its whistle-blowing protection to the holders of judicial office.

For the purposes of employment law, a significant proportion of clergy – for example, Church of England incumbents with freehold tenure and Methodist ministers – are, like judges, office-holders rather than workers or employees: see, for example, President of the Methodist Conference v Preston [2013] UKSC 29 and Sharpe v The Bishop of Worcester [2015] EWCA Civ 399. The judgment in Gilham suggests that, if a similar issue were to arise in future in relation to holders of an ecclesiastical office, the protection given to whistle-blowers under Part IVA of the 1996 Act would also be extended to them. [Frank Cranmer]