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Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The shadow Health Secretary began by extending his deepest sympathies to the patients and families affected, and I am sure that that will be echoed across the whole House and across the country. Today is another difficult day for those people, but we hope that this report will allow their voices to be heard at least more clearly than they have been hitherto. The hon. Gentleman paid tribute to the work of Cure the NHS, which campaigned to have the events at Stafford hospital thoroughly investigated, and I believe that the report published today meets that requirement for a thorough investigation into those events. He asked whether the initial inquiries were internal to the Department of Health and he called for an independent inquiry, but that is the inquiry that I commissioned. As I said in my statement, when I came to this Department, I believed that a further process of independent inquiry was necessary. I commissioned it; I set it up; and I will deal with what it tells me today. I do not think it is possible to read the Francis report and conclude that it does not tell the full truth or reveal the whole picture of what happened at the hospital. We now move forward from the inquiry to consider the actions of the regulatory and supervisory bodies. I have made it clear to Robert Francis that, should he need further powers to conduct that part of his work, he can come back to me and I will consider the request. I draw the shadow Health Secretary's attention to the draft terms of reference issued today, which state:""The Government's presumption is that the inquiry will be held in public, but this decision is a matter for the Chair."" I would welcome the hon. Gentleman's comments on those draft terms of reference, but I believe that they meet the tests that he put before us a few moments ago. The hon. Gentleman also asked about the PCT, the SHA and the Department of Health. He is quite right to do so: he is quite right to ask questions about those bodies, their role in what happened and why things were not spotted sooner. That is precisely why we are setting up the second stage of the inquiry—so that those searching questions can be asked of those organisations. The hon. Gentleman asked me about targets, suggesting that they were the problem. Let me quote the Francis report:""As will be seen, the pressure to meet the waiting target was sometimes detrimental to good care in the organisation. This is inconsistent with the guidance about targets published by the Department of Health. It is vital that this target must not in any way jeopardise the quality of care offered to patients."" If the hon. Gentleman reads the Francis report in full, as I am sure he will, he will see that the failure of the trust was the implementation of targets within it, and, indeed, the failure to provide adequate staffing levels on the wards to ensure that care could be delivered safely and meet the standards that other trusts around the country are able to meet. That is the conclusion I draw from the inquiry. The hon. Gentleman asked what steps we can take to ensure that this does not happen elsewhere in the NHS. With an organisation on the scale of the NHS, I am sure that he and I would accept that things will go wrong and problems will occur. The right thing to do is to face up to them and take action to prevent them happening again. In this particular case, I believe that we have faced up to the enormity of what happened at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. It has been laid bare today in a very detailed report of more than 900 pages. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that I take my responsibility to act on the report's findings with great seriousness. That is precisely what I will do.