Today’s hearing of the Public Accounts Committee is going to be real box office stuff. Sir David Nicholson is giving evidence, supposedly on the NHS IT programme, but he’ll find himself confronted by Tory committee member Steve Barclay, who, armed with freedom of information evidence of 52 gagging orders in the NHS, will demand that the health service boss step down immediately.
This is what Nicholson told the Health Select Committee when he gave evidence on 5 March (full transcript here):
Barbara Keeley: What do you think, as chief executive of the NHS, of a loophole like that existing-where £500,000 of taxpayers’ money could be used to gag somebody who wanted to talk about patient safety?
Sir David Nicholson: As I say, the comments you make there are bitterly contested by the organisations involved-bitterly contested.
Barbara Keeley: What do you think of that as a use of taxpayers’ money?
Sir David Nicholson: In terms of the judicial mediation, it is the first time in my experience that I have ever seen that done. I have asked around and I do not think there is another example of that at all. If it is a loophole to get round the Department, then it needs to be closed and we need to think about how we might do that.
Barbara Keeley: Are you doing that?
Sir David Nicholson: We will absolutely do that to see what it is. It may not be possible, legally, to do it, but not giving the ability for the SHA remuneration committee to sign it off and for the Department and the Treasury to sign off the business case seems to me wrong.
But that sole example doesn’t look so lonely, after Barclay’s Freedom of Information requests found another 52 similar severance payments costing more than £2 million. Nicholson is retiring next year anyway, but backbenchers want him out now.
There are two things worth noting about this row. The first is that the Tory leadership have continued to keep Nicholson close in public, while also refusing to take the fight to Labour over the Stafford Hospital scandal. This drip-drip of revelations about the culture in the health service under his leadership makes that loyalty look a little mis-placed.
The second is that because the leadership have stepped back, it has fallen to a bunch of enthusiastic Conservative backbenchers to dig around for this information using FoI and parliamentary questions. Barclay and Charlotte Leslie have been the most prominent campaigners on this issue. They are using select committees, rather than their colleagues in government, to pressure the chief executive. This is another example of the supercharged backbencher, but it’s also a sign that MPs are better at sensing where their party should go in these instances than the leadership.
P.S. Both Barclay and Leslie are members of the group of Tories I identified as the ‘curry Conservatives’ in the Telegraph last week. Their work on the culture in the NHS is another reason for the leadership to listen to this bunch of ‘muscular pragmatists’ on the backbenches. I also hear that another curry club has sprung up in the party in the past week. Clearly it’s the plat du jour if you’re hoping to go places as a Tory these days.
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