Health and Care Bill (Second sitting)

Mary Robinson Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Do you want to add anything to that, Mr Trenholm?

Ian Trenholm: No, thank you.

[Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)]

Q I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for whistleblowing. I am interested in the powers that you are going to be taking on—how those will enhance your work—and also in what you said about properly protecting information. Of course, part of this is about properly protecting the person or individual who provides that information in very many cases. I am wondering whether this is going to enhance the ability to whistleblow and to highlight these issues, and whether there is more to be done legislatively and whether you see this as being a forerunner to it.

Could I also ask about the regulatory role? With regard to whistleblowers who raise these issues—we are talking about safety and the best interests of patients here—will this enhance the powers and abilities that you have, or is more needed still.

Keith Conradi: One of the clauses actually will require people to speak to us, so there is a compulsion on people to provide evidence. In a way, that might help some people who are undecided about what they should be doing. But to balance that, it is very important to be able to protect the evidence that is given, and there are protections within the clauses. I think they could be improved. But the whole idea is that we create this space, where really the only safety valve is the High Court, and I believe that is appropriate as the only place where that information can actually be released.

I think it is worth saying, however, that when people talk to us and use this sort of safe space, the whole idea is that it is not a place where they are going to unload stuff that will never see the light of day again; we use that information, either in our final reports or to help us further the investigation. It is just that it is non-attributable, so we do not mention people’s names. The idea is that we use it to further patient safety.

My concern about the way the Bill is currently written is that there is a provision for coroners—some coroners—to be able to see this information. I think that will inhibit some people from speaking to us—and the whole point is that people are uninhibited from doing so. Having that potential release of information into that sphere will, I think, degrade the ability of the investigation to do its job.

Ian Trenholm: Building on what Keith has just said, I think we would see the Bill as giving an opportunity to create a safe space. It creates an opportunity for people to talk about things that they may not otherwise have wished to talk about. What Keith’s team can then do is look at that information. We need to make sure that we have the right data-sharing protocols in place. Keith’s team can then talk to my team about what is happening on the ground. They can do whatever anonymisation is necessary. So we might get to hear about things that we perhaps would not otherwise get to hear about.

That is a real positive at provider level, but if you click up a level, you quite often find that, from a safety and quality point of view, people’s poor experiences are driven as much by their experience of it as a system and the way they transit between different providers as it is about the experience in an individual provider. So if you have a person who perhaps is working between providers or in some kind of community provision, they will see multiple providers and they will become, if you like, better whistleblowers. Our work on systems and our assurance on systems will help as well, I think. Of course, Keith’s team make recommendations to us as a regulator, in the way they do to other people. So I think this is generally a move in the right direction.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Mary, did I see you trying to come in with another point?

[Mary Robinson]

Q Thank you so much, Mr McCabe; that is very kind of you. I have just a very short question. How does any of this relate to the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 and the way you are required to protect the disclosures given by individuals, in terms of the issues that you have already raised?

Keith Conradi: I would probably need a lawyer to give you the proper answer, but I do not think any of this would trump anything else. We would still need to acquiesce and accept those disclosures as they happened, so I do not think that would be an issue for us.

[The Chair]

Anyone else? It does not look like it. I thank both our witnesses for their evidence.

Examination of Witnesses

Councillor James Jamieson and Professor Maggie Rae gave evidence.