NHS: Dangerous Waste and Body Parts Disposal

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Wednesday 10th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer, but at the heart of this rather horrible matter is the issue of contracting out our important NHS services, and a lack of accountability. Does the Minister agree that contracting out and subcontracting any NHS function does not absolve the commissioner of responsibility and the need to monitor and seek assurance that the contract is being delivered according to the contract, which presumably in this case involved proper and legal disposal. So where was the monitoring and the assurance to the commissioner that allowed that to happen? It seems to have failed comprehensively. Does that not suggest that this service, which is so crucial, should be delivered in-house? What we see here is a massive market failure, and indeed a massive regulatory failure.

Secondly, my right honourable friend Yvette Cooper asked in the Commons whether the Minister accepted that,

“it is a basic principle that, when dealing with any kind of public health or environmental health risk or incident, proper, full, factual information is provided to the public and the community”,—[Official Report, Commons, 9/10/18; col. 37.]

and at the earliest opportunity to Parliament. You do not hide behind a contractual negotiation, so will the Minister tell me where the line lies between the need to inform Parliament of a public health incident and the need to protect commercial confidentiality?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I can say to the noble Baroness that the NHS contracts out very large numbers of services of all kinds, and indeed has contracted out this kind of service for around 30 years. What we have here is not a market failure but a company that has broken the law, and which is therefore being pursued by the regulatory system that we have in place. That is about making sure that the Environment Agency, in this case—because it is about environmental health—is monitoring, issuing notices and raising issues as they come up, which is precisely what it has done here. But I agree with the noble Baroness that certainly there are lessons to be learned about monitoring, and we are absolutely looking at that as a consequence of this incident.

However, it is very important to state two points. No risk to public health has been established, because of the secure circumstances under which the waste—albeit way too much of it—was being kept, and there was no interruption to the provision of services, so there was no risk to patients or to hospital operations. On providing information at the earliest opportunity, we have done exactly that. As I said, no public health risk has been established, and we came to Parliament on the first day it came back, once the termination notice had been in place with a part suspension.