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The Labour government’s plan to ban Non-Disclosure Agreements that silence victims of harassment and discrimination is long overdue — but the real scandal is that such agreements were ever treated as valid in the first place. Civil contracts cannot be allowed to override the criminal law.

It’s one of those truths that ought to be obvious: if someone has been harassed, abused, or discriminated against, no private agreement should be able to stop them from speaking out.

The criminal law of the land must come before any civil contract.

And yet, for years, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) have been used — and abused — to do precisely that.

Now, the Labour government says it will end the practice.

An amendment to the Employment Rights Bill will make it illegal for employers to use NDAs to silence victims of sexual misconduct or discrimination.

“Time we stamped this practice out,” said Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner.

She’s not wrong.

But the question must be asked: how was this ever allowed to happen?

Let’s be clear: NDAs that attempt to stop someone reporting a crime are not legally enforceable.

You can’t contract your way out of the law.

Yet that’s not how they’ve been used.

These “agreements” — drafted by powerful employers and waved under the noses of frightened, often isolated victims — have been used to intimidate and silence, not legally bind.

Zelda Perkins, the former assistant to Harvey Weinstein who broke her own NDA to expose his abuse, has spent years campaigning to stop this practice.

She rightly calls it a “horror” that the law, in effect, protected “the powerful person in the room, not the victims of a sexual crime.”

The reality is that many people who sign NDAs don’t know their rights.

They don’t realise that such clauses are often legally meaningless.

But they work because the fear is real — fear of retaliation, of being sued, of losing one’s livelihood.

When you’re up against a company with lawyers and money, even a bluff can look like a threat.

That is why the law must now make it crystal clear: no NDA can ever silence someone from reporting a crime. Not now – not ever.

NDAs have a legitimate place in protecting trade secrets or intellectual property.

But when they are used to cover up misconduct, they become tools of corruption.

They turn abuse into just another risk to be managed.

They allow institutions to protect reputations instead of people.

They turn justice into a private transaction.

This legislation, if passed, will bring the UK in line with countries like Ireland, the United States, and parts of Canada, where similar bans already exist.

It’s a welcome change — but also a damning indictment of how much silence has already been bought, and how much suffering has already been hidden.

We should never have needed a new law to say that the criminal law comes first.

That should have been a given.

And yet, here we are — and the least we can do now is make sure this shameful loophole is closed, permanently.

Justice done behind closed office doors is no justice at all.

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