NHS Trusts: Accountability

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 10th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Mike Penning]

I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman. We have discussed and debated this before, and this must be like “Groundhog Day” for the Minister. I should have thanked him earlier for bearing with me in what may be a much longer debate than he probably assumed when he saw it on the Order Paper.

It is important that there is proper due process when we employ people who work in the NHS, and in relation to salaries. I am sure that the Minister will now go away and check with the Treasury how this happened. My understanding was that such remuneration—and we are going back a couple of years—would not have been allowed even then. Trust in the NHS is vital. There are other examples, which I will produce, that will show that although the NHS is absolutely world renowned, there are errors in it that infuriate the people who it is supposed to be representing and looking after.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

This is a timely debate. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar): it seems to me that a game of musical chairs is going on. We see chief executives who leave under questionable circumstances get a job outside the NHS and then turn up at another trust somewhere else. There does not seem to be any accountability.

As politicians, we are often accused of being remote, but nobody is more remote than people at some of the trusts I have looked at. Someone trying to get information from them about their budgets and where the expenditure goes has a job on their hands. It is about time that how the Department is run is looked at; it gives directions to the rest of the chief executives in the country, even on appointments.

[Sir Mike Penning]

I agree almost completely; I would just say that sometimes these people do not even leave the NHS—they stay within the structure of the NHS, but just go to a different trust in a different part of the country. Then they just reappear again and again.

I have often wondered about something. A director of nursing should clearly have come up through the nursing ranks; I understand that. Clearly, also, clinicians have to be involved in the clinical side. But why does NHS management have to be completely incestuous in how it works? If someone started as a nurse or doctor, how on earth do they have the necessary qualifications to run a massive multi-million pound organisation? Yet that is how it seems to happen. It took a long time for Mr Ron Glatter to get the figures when he was challenged. When we eventually got them, it was like pulling teeth: was it a package or a salary? “This is personal information.” This is taxpayers’ money. One of the most difficult things is to find out exactly where the money is going.

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[Mr Cunningham]

The right hon. Gentleman is being very gracious in giving way. We had a case involving two consultants. With one in particular, the case actually ended up in the courts. We have never been able to find out the cost of the litigation, but it was anywhere between £2 million and £4 million. On the one hand, the public has got to raise the money if they want to challenge something, but within the NHS itself, where resources are very scarce, a lot of money is wasted on litigation. This consultant was taken to task because he was a whistleblower. On the one hand they encourage whistleblowers, but if they do not like what the whistleblowers have to say they suspend them and eventually try to get rid of them through litigation.

[Sir Mike Penning]

I was coming on to that point, but let me meet it head on now. I speak to nurses and other frontline staff who look after my local patients, including some doctors, and they are petrified of telling their own MP what is going on in case of retribution. Perhaps the Minister will help me to get to the bottom of the number of gagging orders out there at the moment in my trust, whereby things have been settled and people have been gagged. The types of threats in the gagging orders that are put on them are very severe.

There was a consultation panel in my constituency about the future of health, and the people allowed on the panel had been gagged. These are members of the general public who have been told categorically not to talk to me. They are not to tell me what is going on in the NHS in my own local community. They will be thrown off the panel if they do, and it is worse for the staff who have gagging orders against them. This is very serious.

We see the amount of money the NHS uses in litigation, whereas our patients have to raise money themselves. The NHS seems to settle very easily when there are threats against it relating to malpractice or when something has gone wrong at the trivial end of things, but when things are really serious and deaths have taken place, down come the shutters. Nationally, we have seen what happens—it has happened recently in Gosport and in Staffordshire when I was a shadow Minister—unless the staff have 100% confidence that they can go to their MP or their line management and tell them what has been going on. Sometimes it can be quite trivial, but often it is very serious, and there is clearly retribution against them should they do so. That is something we need to sort out.