I will make some progress.
The question the right hon. Member for Leigh needs to answer is why he refused 81 separate requests to set up that public inquiry. He says that he did not want to distract the hospital from the essential task of making immediate improvements, but does he now accept that if he wants people to take his party seriously on NHS accountability he needs to apologise? That was a mistake. Until we have a proper apology—not just for what happened, but for the catastrophic policy mistakes made by his party—no one will believe that Labour would not make the same errors of judgment again. On the Government Benches, we are clear that accountability, dignity and respect for patients, particularly vulnerable, older people who are unable to speak out for themselves, must be embedded in every corner of the NHS.
We will announce measures to set up a proper, independent peer review inspection regime led by a new chief inspector of hospitals that will not simply look at targets, but make judgments on whether hospitals are putting patients first. We will set up a single failure regime, where the suspension of the board can be triggered by failures in care as well as failures in finance; a patient-centred culture, by making the friends and family test a key part of the hospital inspection regime; clinically led commissioning, so that key decisions are made by people who see patients in their own surgeries; and an overhaul of the hospital complaints procedures led by the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) and Professor Tricia Hart. We will do that with the minimum of upheaval. It is worth emphasising that Robert Francis himself says that the changes he calls for can largely be implemented within the system that has now been created by the new reforms.