Health Bill

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Ian Sollom

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ian Sollom (St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

Reducing duplication, streamlining priorities, and getting resources close to frontline care—these are reasonable aims. My concern is that in pursuing simplification the Bill makes a series of choices on patient safety that it is not clear have been fully thought through and that risk repeating mistakes that this country has paid a very high price to learn from.

Through successive inquiries, including Mid Staffordshire, Morecambe Bay, Shrewsbury, Ian Paterson—I could name more—Parliament has repeatedly recognised that the NHS cannot be relied on to scrutinise itself. Each found the same pattern: concerns present within the system but not acted on, problems developing in isolated services, and a culture in which those who raised concerns were treated as the difficulty rather than as sources of vital information.

Yet the Bill’s general approach is to remove independent scrutiny rather than improve it. I am not arguing that all the bodies that have been created—Healthwatch, the National Guardian’s Office, which has been absorbed into NHS England, which will now be abolished, and HSSIB—have worked exactly as intended. In fact, I have been working with families and others affected by failings at Cambridge University Hospitals trust. It has been suggested that the trust has not published independent information, commissioned by the trust, that found 32 missed opportunities to identify and address concerns about a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon between 2012 and 2024, and children were harmed as a result.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the HSSIB question. The Dash review accused HSSIB of exceeding its remit. That is completely wrong in law, and it was always intended to look at systemic problems across the system. The new investigation function in the CQC will not be able to do that, because it will not be independent.

[Ian Sollom]

The CQC and HSSIB themselves have expressed concerns about how those two organisations might be brought together. The AAIB is separate from the Civil Aviation Authority, and that model was created for a good reason. The hon. Member made good points about the statistics on that earlier.

Returning to the case I was talking about, a clinician at the trust who did raise concerns formally in 2015 was simultaneously subjected to disciplinary proceedings and told by the trust that they did not want to hear any more complaints. I wish I could say that I had not heard similar stories from NHS staff several times in a little under two years as an MP.

Just because there are some flaws in those independent systems for the NHS, it is not a reason to remove the independence. That would represent a return to conditions that so many of the inquiries warned us about, and I think that patients would rightly question whether lessons have really been learned.

As the Bill proceeds to Committee stage, I urge the Government to ask a simple question about each body that it proposes to absorb or scrap: not just whether the function will still be performed somewhere but whether it will be performed with genuine independence from the organisations that it scrutinises. That independence has been hard-won, and I hope that Ministers will reflect on that carefully before legislating to remove it.