Health Bill

Stuart Andrew Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 8th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dr Johnson]

Absolutely; my hon. Friend has obviously read my speech. What would happen if the new unit identified the CQC itself as the problem? Ministers have not provided good answers to these questions. To be honest, they cannot, because the Government cannot have their cake and eat it. Either HSSIB remains independent or it is folded into the CQC and loses its independence. The Government are either decluttering the landscape by removing an organisation or simply hiding it inside another organisation, to the detriment of both. We have tabled amendment 1 to protect HSSIB, and I urge the Government to support it in the interests of patient safety.

[Stuart Andrew (Daventry) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an important point about HSSIB. We have heard time and again that frontline staff value the safety that HSSIB provides to them and the confidence they have in reporting. Given that we in this Chamber have heard some harrowing stories about maternity services around the country, does she not think it is important that we listen to the staff, and not just one individual with a different point of view?

[Dr Johnson]

As always, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right.

HSSIB has recently produced a report, which it would benefit the Government to listen to. The House will be aware that the advice and guidance service provides GPs with specialist advice, which sometimes avoids referrals. However, Ministers have made it mandatory to ask for advice before certain types of referrals, and set an aim for one in four referrals to be diverted back. The Government said that they were not rationing care or meddling with waiting lists—that there was nothing to see here, and that the Opposition were spreading misinformation—but HSSIB has published an interim report linking this process to delays in patient care, including cancer diagnoses. New clause 141 asks the Government to suspend the new process until they have properly considered it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stuart Andrew]

Does my hon. Friend agree that Donna Ockenden’s report into what happened in Nottingham, particularly the harrowing stories of the mortuary issues there, adds to the case that she is making?

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for the fantastic work that he did as shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, and he is absolutely right. We really need the full response to the Fuller report in order to implement not only changes to mortuaries, but all the other amendments that it recommended.

New clause 41 would place a duty on the Human Tissue Authority to establish and maintain a register of every business brought within its oversight, with how that register operates set by regulation, so that for the first time a grieving family could check, before they hand over the body of a loved one, whether the business in front of them is properly overseen. I recognise that the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) has tabled new clause 42 on a new, bespoke freestanding regulator. Both new clauses would fix the same issue, and either will do.

The key thing is that this is a moment for the Government to seize, not resist. Ministers have already said that, in principle, they agree with what new clause 41 would require of them. Every trade body agrees. Every family who has been failed agrees. Every Member from across the House who signed our letter agrees. It feels like the Government agree, so I ask the Minister to tell the House exactly when a statutory scheme will be brought forward by the Department of Health and Social Care, and to set out the timetable for implementation.

None of us is comfortable dwelling on our own mortality, which is exactly why the funeral sector has gone on for so long without proper scrutiny. It is a truism—we hear it all the time—that funerals are for the living; they are for families to say goodbye to their loved ones with dignity. They should be able to grieve without the added horror of questioning whether the body they buried was the right one, or whether the ashes they scattered belonged to the right person. Robert Bush’s sentencing should be the last time that this House has to debate such a gruesome case, but it will not be unless the Government push ahead to close this regulatory black hole.