Dangerous Waste and Body Parts Disposal: NHS

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Barclay]

I should clarify that it is not me personally who has terminated these contracts. These contracts with HES are held by the trusts themselves, and therefore it is a decision taken by those trusts.

As I said earlier, there is significant additional capacity within the incinerator landscape to process the waste generated by this contract, and therefore the suggestion in some quarters that this is an issue of a lack of capacity is simply not valid. To be clear, HES produces 595 tonnes of waste a month that goes to incineration, and the NHS identified 2,269 tonnes of incineration capacity, so reports that there is a lack of capacity in the market are not valid.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I learned from the Health Service Journal that Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust was one of those affected. It is totally unacceptable that clearly one of Ministers’ objectives was to cover things up for as long as possible to save their own blushes because of the failure of a Government contractor. Members of this House should not learn of such events from the media. We should hear it from Ministers via the Dispatch Box or the relevant Select Committee—or there is such a thing as email.

Ministers have announced that £1 million of contingency funding is to be made available to support trusts affected. Will that be met from existing departmental budgets, or will money be allocated by the Treasury? Further to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), surely it should be the failing contractor that coughs up £1 million, if not more. It should not come from taxpayers.

[Stephen Barclay]

We all learn things on a regular basis from the HSJ, but it seems misplaced to suggest that the hon. Gentleman should have been told about this when we were ensuring continuity of service and putting in place alternative arrangements to ensure that operations could continue at Barking and other hospitals. I have already addressed that point.

As I said, some of the cost—the contingency cost—will be absorbed centrally. The normal cost of clearing clinical waste was borne by the trusts before and will continue to be borne by the trusts.