UK: updates to template settlement agreements advisable in light of commencement of Victims and Prisoners Act on 1 October

Employers in England & Wales may wish to update their template settlement agreements in the next few months, to reflect the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 which now has a confirmed commencement date of 1 October 2025.  The Government has recently published guidance on the new provisions, available here. 

Many settlement agreements and employment contracts will include confidentiality provisions (or 'non-disclosure agreements' or 'NDA'); usually these will be subject to various carve-outs (such as for whistleblowing disclosures or reporting a crime to the police).  From October these carve-outs may need minor amendment to reflect new exemptions for 'victims of crime' to make certain other disclosures in order to access confidential advice and victim support.  The guidance states that it will be best practice for NDAs to expressly set these exemptions out.

Any provision of an NDA signed on or after 1 October 2025 will be unenforceable to the extent that it seeks to prevent a victim of crime, or someone who reasonably believes themselves to be a victim of crime, from making a so-called 'permitted disclosure', ie a disclosure of criminal conduct to:

• police or other bodies which investigate or prosecute crime, for investigating or prosecuting the relevant conduct
• qualified lawyers, for seeking legal advice about the relevant conduct
• regulated professionals (including regulated healthcare professionals), for obtaining professional support in relation to the relevant conduct
• victim support services, for obtaining support in relation to the relevant conduct
• regulators, for cooperating with the regulator in relation to the relevant conduct
• to a person authorised to receive information on behalf of any of the above (for example, a receptionist or translator), for the relevant purposes mentioned above
• a victim’s close family, for the purpose of obtaining support in relation to the relevant conduct.  Close family is defined as child, parent or partner (ie spouse, civil partner or someone with whom there is an intimate personal relationship of significant duration).

For these purposes, victim includes someone who has suffered physical, mental, emotional or financial harm directly as a result of criminal conduct or as a result of seeing, hearing, or otherwise directly experiencing the effects of criminal conduct at the time the conduct occurred.  

Many standard templates will not currently cover all of these exemptions expressly, for example to permit disclosures to children or parents, or victim support services, and may therefore need updating.

Note that this legislation was passed by the last parliament.  The current government is still considering whether to place further restrictions on the use of NDAs.