Jimmy Savile (NHS Investigations)

Duncan Hames Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

What we are announcing today will be closely fed into the report that the Home Office is currently overseeing. My hon. Friend makes an important point. Clearly, some things in the report would not happen today. We can be confident that the culture across the NHS and social services has changed significantly in a positive way. There is much greater awareness of safeguarding issues. However, the report also said that elements of other things that it highlighted could happen today. That is why it is so important that we learn the necessary lessons.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

The reports make it clear that Ministers’ appointment and use of Savile was improper and often contrary to advice from clinicians and officials. Former Minister Edwina Currie is quoted as telling the investigation last year:

“He knew how to pin people to the wall and get from them what he wanted. … he’d had a look at everything he could use to blackmail the POA … I thought it was a pretty classy piece of operation.”

Ministers Vaughan and Jenkin appointed Jimmy Savile to oversee the rebuilding of the national spinal injuries centre, contrary to advice, we are told in today’s report, from officials who thought that it would be better for those funds to be spent on centres of expertise around the country. Is it not critical that we understand the governance failures in this sorry saga, and that that insight feeds into the work of the Goddard inquiry?

[Mr Hunt]

Of course it is important that we learn the governance lessons, but the report is careful. It does not use the word “improper” in relation to the behaviour of Ministers or civil servants. It says that they acted reasonably. It raises some important questions, and I hope that the tone of my statement will reassure my hon. Friend that I do not seek to duck the fact that there are clearly questions about whether Ministers and civil servants behaved in the appropriate way. It is important that we learn the lessons from what went wrong.