How can we change the culture of cover-ups?

First, accept that they are the norm Martha Gill

- Martha Gill

From grooming gangs to the NHS, scandals show us that whistleblowers are the exception - and complicity is everywhere

Institutional cover-ups are rife. You might even say they are a rule. Again and again, in very different organisations, wherever we find serious harm we almost always find large numbers of people choosing to conceal it. The Post Office scandal, the infected blood scandal, the Hillsborough disaster, the Shrewsbury maternity and Mid Staffs hospital scandals, Grenfell, Windrush, sexual abuse by priests and celebrities, poisoned water, police brutality - first comes the scandal and then, inevitably, the cover-up. It is in fact the rare person who does not collude, ignore or shy away from the problem: we call these people whistleblowers, the startling exception to what we might call the "cover-up rule".

Yet we have a strange capacity to be surprised by the cover-up rule. "How on earth could this happen?" we ask, every time. What is wrong with this particular institution, that made it so uniquely despicable? How is it that it happened to contain so many evil people all at once?

We tend to conclude it must be a result of one of two things: unusually malign characters, or unusually dysfunctional systems, lacking proper channels to report wrongdoing or hold people to account. We set to work trying to root each of these out.