Time is against us, I am afraid.
The Secretary of State is wrong if he thinks that top-down regulation is the only answer. It cannot prevent things from going wrong in the first place. The Secretary of State should accept all the recommendations of the Francis report, including the recommendations that are designed to change the culture at a local level.
Let me now turn to the future of Stafford hospital, and address the point made by the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash). If there was one thing that the people of Stafford deserved after what had been a long and painful process, it was the legitimate expectation that, at the end of that process, they would see a fully functioning local hospital that was both safe and sustainable. That is why I believe that the conclusion of the trust special administrator process is both wrong and unfair on them. It will result in a significant downgrade of the hospital, and there is still no clarity in regard to important services such as maternity.
The issue of the future of Stafford hospital goes to the heart of the handling of the inquiry and the decisions made about it. When I arrived at the Department of Health in June 2009, the official advice that I received was that I should not hold any further inquiry into what had gone wrong, because it would distract the hospital from the essential task of making immediate improvements. I could not accept that advice, because I believed that we needed to get to the full truth of what had gone wrong. That is why I appointed Robert Francis to conduct an independent inquiry. However, I stopped short of a full public inquiry because I had been warned that such an inquiry could destabilise the hospital and prevent it from making improvements. The Secretary of State nods.
That is the advice that I was given, but I told Robert Francis that he could come back to me and ask for powers to compel witnesses to appear before him if he
felt that that was necessary. He came back to me to say that he felt that he had had all the co-operation that he needed. Indeed, he had had more, because of the nature of the inquiry that I had set up.
As the Secretary of State will recall, after the first Francis report I commissioned a second-stage inquiry into regulatory systems. I did not disagree with the coalition’s decision to upgrade it to a full public inquiry, as that was always a finely balanced judgment, but I did warn at the time that the hospital would need further support, given what a full public inquiry would entail. I do not believe that it has been given that support. Worse, the administration process that it has undergone has been brutal. I do not believe that there is a district general hospital in the land that could survive a three-year public inquiry followed by financial administration. The Labour party’s view—informed by the Lewisham and Stafford examples—is that the Government are misusing the administration powers created by the last Government to drive through reconfiguration on cost rather than clinical grounds, and we will therefore move to delete those powers from the Care Bill next week.