NHS Funding Bill

Jerome Mayhew Excerpts

Legislative Grand Committee & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & 3rd reading & Programme motion
Tuesday 4th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Hunt]

They are both interesting ideas. The plan at the moment is that resource will be given to schools for a teacher to volunteer to devote a proportion of their time to this, and that there will be funding for them to do so, similar to the way in which schools have a special educational needs co-ordinator who is a teacher devoted to the special needs of the pupils in that school. I personally would have no objection if that were a separate counsellor, but this needs to be a resource inside the school—someone who is regularly at the school and who knows the children there. That is the important thing.

With permission, Dame Rosie, I would like to comment on some of the other amendments and on some of the comments made by the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston. He rightly talked about the issues around maternity safety, and I agree that it is vital that we continue the maternity safety training fund. That is not directly the subject of one of his amendments, but it is indirectly connected to it. Twice a week in the NHS, the Health Secretary has to sign off a multi-million pound settlement to a family whose child has been disabled for life as a result of medical negligence. What is even more depressing is that there is no discernible evidence that that number is going down. The reason for that is that when such tragedies happen, instead of doing the most important thing, which is learning the lesson of what went wrong and ensuring that it is spread throughout the whole country, we end up with a six-year legal case. It is impossible for a family with a child disabled at birth to get compensation from the NHS unless they prove in court that the doctor was negligent. Obviously, the doctor will fight that. That is why we still have too much of a cover-up culture, despite the best intentions of doctors and nurses. This is the last thing they want to do, but the system ends up putting them under pressure to do it. That is why we are not learning from mistakes. I am afraid that that is the same thing that was referred to in the Paterson inquiry report that was published today: the systemic covering up of problems that allowed Mr Paterson’s work to carry on undetected for so long. The hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston is absolutely right on that.

I think it is a fair assessment of safety in the NHS to say that huge strides have been made in the past five or six years on transparency. It is much more open about things that go wrong than it used to be, and that is a very positive development. But transparency alone is not enough. We have to change the practice of doctors and nurses on the ground, and that means spreading best practice. Unfortunately, that is not happening, which is why, even after the tragedies of Mid Staffs, Morecambe Bay and Southern Health, we are facing yet another tragedy at Shrewsbury and Telford—I see my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) in her place, and she has campaigned actively on that issue. The big challenge now is to think about ways to change our blame culture into a learning culture.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

I declare an interest in that, a long time ago, I was a personal injury barrister, including in cases of medical negligence. Does my right hon. Friend think a possible solution to the resistance to blame in the national health service might be the adoption of a no-fault compensation scheme much like that in the personal injury sphere in New Zealand, for example?

[Jeremy Hunt]

My hon. Friend makes an important suggestion. We considered such a thing when I was at the Department of Health and Social Care, but we decided that it would be very expensive. One of the tragedies is that many people who suffer actually make no legal claim because they are so committed to the NHS, so we have a system that gives huge amounts of money to one group of people and nothing at all to those who decide that they do not want to sue the NHS.

We need to look at tort reform, because most barristers and lawyers working in this field want the outcome of their cases to be that the NHS learns from what went wrong and does not repeat it. Unfortunately, that is not what happens with the current system. The involvement of lawyers and litigation causes a defensive culture to emerge, and we actually do the opposite. We do not learn from mistakes, and that is what we now have to grip and change.

I want to say something positive, because if we do change that we will be the first healthcare system in the world to do it properly. We are already by far the most transparent system in the world, mainly because people in this place are always asking questions about the NHS—and rightly so. Healthcare systems all over the world experience the same problem. It is difficult to talk openly about mistakes because one can make a mistake in any other walk of life and get on with one’s life, but if someone dies because of the mistake, that is an incredibly difficult thing for the individuals concerned to come to terms with. That is why we end up on this in this vicious legal circle.

On capital to revenue transfers, I was a guilty party during my time as Health Secretary. There were many capital to revenue transfers because we were running out of money, so capital budgets were raided. I fully understand why the Opposition wanted to table amendment 3, but I respectfully suggest that the trouble is that it would result not in more money going into the NHS but in more money going back to the Treasury from unspent capital amounts. The real issue of capital projects is getting through the bureaucratic processes that mean that capital budgets are actually spent.