Health Transition Risk Register

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

I will repeat what my noble Friend Earl Howe said: we have every intention of publishing the risk register, but will do so when it is no longer directly relevant to the formulation and development of policy.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

Having been involved in the production of risk registers for many years, I know that they are pertinent to the point in time at which they are produced and require free thinking by those who put them together. There must then be a mitigation strategy to prevent the risks from ever happening. The key issue is this: what does my right hon. Friend think would happen to the policy advisers who put together risk registers for Ministers if these highly sensitive documents were put in the public domain?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. To be absolutely clear, some risk registers are designed to be published. For example, strategic health authorities publish risk registers, and have done for a period of time, because they are designed to be published. The way in which the Labour party used the risk registers published by strategic health authorities, I think at the last Health questions, amply demonstrated that not only are they open to misrepresentation and misuse, but that the Labour party is very keen to misuse and misrepresent them. Even more so would it misrepresent and abuse the information in risk registers that were designed for the frank expression of advice if they were published. I do not need to speculate further in reply to my hon. Friend, because Lord O’Donnell, the former Cabinet Secretary, made it very clear that we would end up with bland, anodyne documents that did not serve the management purpose for which they were created.