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Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

The Chair of the Health Committee has made a fundamentally important point, and he is right to press me on this issue. I believe that at times there is a failure at local level in the NHS to exercise the openness and transparency for which the House of Commons regularly calls. I recall the debates on the foundation trust legislation. At the heart of that proposal was the replacement of national accountability with a greater degree of local accountability. It is impossible to say that that fundamental founding vision of what it meant to be a foundation trust was fulfilled in the Mid Staffordshire trust, and the issue of whistleblowing is an important aspect of that. I do not believe that there is any Member in any part of the House who does not believe in the principle of whistleblowing. I do not believe that any of us would tolerate in our constituencies circumstances in which staff did not feel that they could come forward. We would want any member of the NHS to feel able and free to bring to our surgeries concerns about the trust in which he or she works. I believe that that goes for every Member of this House: no one who does this job wants to push away problems rather than addressing them directly. We have put that requirement in the NHS constitution, and I repeat it today on the Floor of the House. We fundamentally uphold the right of NHS staff to raise concerns, and if their local trust does not have a culture that supports that, the position must be changed.