Winterbourne View Care Home

Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Paul Burstow]

I think I will say yes to that, but I want to make it clear that I am not answering in the context of hypotheticals. I do not know the conclusions of the exercise, and Ministers who come to the Dispatch Box and promise that things will never happen again are all too often and too soon proven wrong. We must make sure that we do everything we can to learn lessons from this to minimise the risks in the future, and we need to make sure that responsibility and accountability are at the heart of the reforms that the Government are making to health and social care.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

The Minister is right to say that we need to learn lessons from this, but how long will it take us? The CQC has admitted inspecting Winterbourne View three times in the past two years. The South Gloucestershire safeguarding board was informed in October, but apparently took no action before the programme was aired on television. This is not the first such scandal. When I was first elected, one of the first things I did was to persuade the Department of Health to commission the Bergner report into the Longcare home scandal on the borders of my constituency —a similar huge institution in which residents were raped, abused and tortured by the people who were given care of them. It seems to me that it is not just the individual institutions but Government who need to learn the lesson. How much money is the Minister putting into advocates and listeners of the volunteer kind mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Malcolm Wicks), or of the professional kind, so that the voices of those who cannot always speak for themselves are heard in the inspection process?

[Paul Burstow]

I mentioned in my statement that each of the individuals who have been affected in this terrible way have advocates. The hon. Lady makes an important point about the role that advocacy plays for those who lack capacity or the ability in certain circumstances to advocate on their own behalf. We are looking at that as part of the overall reforms of health and social care, but as for a precise sum of money, I do not have a figure in my head that I can give her now. I will write to her on that point.