The National Health Service

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

The hon. Gentleman is saying yes, which I am grateful for. I am open-minded to changes and improvements, and to listening to the experts and those with constituency cases that they can bring to bear, to make sure that the Bill is the best it possibly can be.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I hope very much to address the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill in my remarks later, but my right hon. Friend did not include one important element among the characteristics of the investigations, which is that they are to find the causes of clinical incidents without blame. It is not about satisfying a complaint; it is about finding without blame so that we can talk about things that have gone wrong without blaming people. It is about understanding the clinical, human factors that lead people to make perfectly understandable mistakes.

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend is quite right. I was trying to shorten my speech, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I missed out a paragraph. I should have said that the purpose of the Bill is to enable staff to speak openly and honestly about errors without fear of blame or liability. That is exactly the point that my hon. Friend made and to which he paid an awful lot of attention in the drafting and prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill.

Finally, let me turn to the proposals on mental health. This country has been on a journey, over a generation, towards recognising that mental health is as important as physical health. There have been contributions to this change in mindset from all sides of the political debate—from Labour Members; especially from the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), to whom I pay tribute; and very much from Government Members, too.

I would like to take a moment to say how much I value the enormous contribution that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have made to changing attitudes towards mental health on this journey. The Mental Health Act 1983 is nearly 40 years old and some of our law is still shaped by 19th century Acts and, indeed, their views of mental illness, and that is completely out of place in the 21st century.