NHS Shared Business Services

Sarah Wollaston Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Let me respond to those points. First, what happened at SBS was totally unacceptable. It was incompetent and it should never have allowed that backlog to develop, but before the hon. Gentleman gets on his high horse, may I remind him that SBS and the governance arrangements surrounding it were set up in 2008, at a time when a Labour Government were rather keen on contracting with the private sector? I know that things have changed, but the fact of the matter is that throughout this process our priority has been to keep patients safe. Transparency is nearly always the right thing; I am the Secretary of State who introduced transparency over standards of care in hospitals—[Laughter.] It is interesting that Opposition Members are laughing, as Labour was the party responsible for sitting on what happened at Mid Staffs for more than four years, when nothing was done.

Transparency is incredibly important but it is not an absolute virtue, and in this case there was a specific reason for that. If we had informed the public and the House immediately, GP surgeries would have been overwhelmed—we are talking about 709,000 pieces of patient data—and they would not have been able to get on as quickly as we needed them to with identifying risk. That was the priority and that is what today’s report confirms: patient safety was the priority of the Department and NHS England. I put it to the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) that if he were in my shoes, and faced with advice that said that it was wrong to go public straight away as that would compromise the very important work GPs had to do to keep patients safe, he would have followed exactly the same advice. That is why, while I completely recognise that there is a potential conflict of interest with the Government arrangements, I do not accept that there was an actual conflict of interest, because patient safety concerns always overrode any interests we had as a shareholder in SBS.

The NHS is a large organisation. It has a huge number of contracts with both the public and private sectors, and no Government of any party can ever guarantee that there will be absolutely no breach of contract. However, what we can do is ensure that we react quickly when there is such a breach, which happened on this occasion, and that we have better assurance than we had on this occasion. I assure the House that the appropriate lessons will be learned.

[Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)]

While Members from across the House will be relieved that so far no patients are identified as having been harmed by this appalling incident, will the Secretary of State set out what steps he is taking to ensure that this can never happen again?

[Mr Hunt]

Absolutely. There is a short-term and long-term lesson. The short-term point is that it is unlikely this would happen again because it was paper correspondence, and we are increasingly moving all the transfer of correspondence to electronic systems. The longer-term point is exactly that—[Interruption.] An Opposition Member mentions cyber-attacks; they are absolutely right to do so, because of course we have different risks. This clearly indicates that we need better checks in place, so that when we trust an independent contractor with very important work, we know that the job is actually being done, and that did not happen in this case.