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NHS Whistleblowing

I declare an interest, in that I initiated the thought that we might have a whistleblower protection Act more than 10 years ago. It finally became the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998. I knew that whistleblowing mattered, but I did not realise that we would have a situation such as Stafford, where the absence of whistleblowing was so serious. It is perplexing why that was the case, and we need to do more investigation into it. The Minister referred to a closed culture, and that is what the report clearly said was the fundamental problem. It is all right having general whistleblowing procedures, and what the Government have produced in the years following the 1998 Act is very good. The stuff that the Department has put out is excellent—it says all the right things—but the test for guidance is what happens to it on the ground. What happens to it when it confronts, as the Minister said, a closed culture such as the one in Stafford? Is the guidance good enough to convert it into a different culture? Can it break open the kind of closed culture that we saw in Stafford? Clearly not. I urge the Minister to reinforce the guidance, to do all the things that he is doing, to have the helpline and so on, but also to accept responsibility for ensuring that every health organisation in this country not only has words on a piece of paper but puts into practice a robust whistleblowing policy that staff have the confidence to use. If they do not do that, we shall again ask after another incident involving horrors like those at Stafford: why were people not able to speak out in the way that they clearly ought to have done?