NHS Shared Business Services

John Bercow Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I welcome the Secretary of State to his place, but is it not an absolute scandal that 709,000 letters, including blood test results, cancer screening appointments and child protection notes, failed to be delivered, were left in an unknown warehouse and, in many cases, were destroyed? Does not the National Audit Office reveal today a shambolic catalogue of failure that took place on the Secretary of State’s watch?

As of four weeks ago, 1,700 cases of potential harm to patients had been identified, with this number set to rise, and a third of GPs have yet to respond on whether unprocessed items sent to them indicate potential harm for patients. Does the Health Secretary agree that this delay is unacceptable? When will all outstanding items be reviewed and processed?

The Secretary of State talks about transparency, but he came to this House in February because we summoned him here. In February, he told us that he first knew of the situation on 24 March 2016, yet the NAO report makes it clear that the Department of Health was informed of the issues on 17 March and that NHS England set up the incident team on 23 March, before he was informed, despite his implying that he set up the incident team. Will he clear up the discrepancies in the timelines between what he told the House and what the NAO reported?

The Secretary of State is a board member of Shared Business Services, and many hon. Members, not least my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), have warned him of the problems and delays with the transfer of records from SBS. Given that those warnings were on the record, why did he not insist on stronger oversight of the contract?

The cost of this debacle could be at least £6.6 million in administration fees alone, equivalent to the average annual salary of 230 nurses. Can the Health Secretary say how those costs will be met and whether he expects them to escalate?

Finally, does the right hon. Gentleman agree with the NAO that there is a conflict of interest between his role as Secretary of State and his role as a board member? Further to that, can he explain why his predecessor as Secretary of State sold one share on 1 January from the Department to Steria, leaving the Secretary of State as a minority stake owner in the company, and never informed Parliament or reported that share in the Department’s annual report—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We are immensely grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but sooner or later the discipline of sticking to the two minutes has to take root. I am afraid that it is as simple as that and I am sorry, but he has had two and a half minutes.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)]

The NAO’s findings are deeply concerning for the families of patients caught up in this chaotic shambles. For those involved and the wider public, this will only deepen their mistrust and misgivings in how the Tories are running the NHS; we can be grateful that they are not in charge in Scotland. Surely it is simply astonishing that a company partly owned by the Department of Health failed to deliver 500,000 NHS letters, many of which contained information critical to patient care. Not only were 1,700 people potentially at risk of harm, but thousands of others were put at risk. Was this SBS contract properly scrutinised by the Secretary of State? Was patient care or cost-cutting at the forefront of that decision? Why did he publish a vague written statement in July 2016 when he actually knew what was going on four months earlier?

[Mr Speaker]

Splendid—the hon. Gentleman was within his time. He gets an additional brownie point.

[Mr Hunt]

I gently say to the hon. Gentleman that it is totally inappropriate to try to make political capital from this incident. The facts of the case are that the NAO today published a report saying that patient safety was the primary concern of both the Department of Health and NHS England throughout. There were some problems with the assurance of that contract, but the contract and the relationship with SBS in particular dates back to 2008. Both sides of the House need to learn the lessons of properly assuring NHS contracts, and I dare say the same is true in Scotland.