Andy Burnham risks another Mid Staffs scandal if he strips away the NHS safeguards designed to stop one

They’ve all highlighted that the NHS is really poor at listening to patients, learning from mistakes, and identifying what might be going wrong.

It is extraordinary that in that context, buried in the Government's Health Bill, are changes that would dismantle much of the patient safety architecture built in the wake of such scandals.

Healthwatch, the independent local bodies that exist to listen to patients and flag when care is going wrong, will be abolished - all 150 of them, along with their 4,000 volunteers. The Care Quality Commission will lose its legal right to demand the information it needs from the NHS to do its job. And the Health Service Safety Investigations Body, which currently guarantees anonymity to NHS staff who blow the whistle on unsafe care, will be folded into the CQC - stripping whistleblowers of that protection.

In 2024, nearly a quarter of NHS patients said they'd experienced poor care in the past year - but more than half did nothing about it. One in five of those stayed silent because they were scared it would affect their treatment if they complained directly. That fear is exactly why patients need somewhere independent to go.

And it isn't as though the NHS has solved its safety problems. There were 403 "never events" - the kind of serious, preventable harm that simply should not happen (such as operating on the wrong body part) recorded in English hospitals in the year to this March. The NHS pays out £3.3 billion a year in clinical negligence claims. This is not a system that can afford to lose its ability to spot when things are going wrong, or its guarantee of protection for the staff brave enough to say so.

The answer to regulators and investigators that are not strong enough, and recommendations that aren’t implemented, should be to strengthen those bodies - not to scrap them. Axing the mechanisms that hold the NHS to account helps no one.

Don’t just take my word for it. Robert Francis - who led the inquiry into Mid Staffs and was appointed by Andy Burnham to that role, said Healthwatch had "proved its worth" to the Department and the system, because patient voices "often hold the key to knowledge about what is going wrong and what changes should be made."

Liberal Democrats are calling on Andy Burnham to intervene before it’s too late. He’s defended Healthwatch in the past - and as Health Secretary commissioned the investigation into the Mid Staffs scandal that shaped the creation of these bodies.

By accepting Liberal Democrat amendments to this bill, Andy Burnham could keep the CQC's right to the information it needs, preserve the safety body's independence, and reverse the closure of Healthwatch with its funding restored. We would go further on whistleblowing too, with new duties on NHS boards to report any suggestion of medical malpractice and new powers for coroners and medical examiners to raise the alarm when they spot a pattern of avoidable deaths.

All it takes is the Prime Minister’s say so.

If Andy Burnham wants to avoid presiding over another Mid Staffs style scandal, he must throw out this ugly inheritance. If he does not act before the bill returns in September, my party will fight these changes - including in the House of Lords where the Government doesn’t have a majority.

Patients have paid too high a price for so many essential protections to be quietly burned away.

Helen Morgan MP is the Liberal Democrat Health and Social Care Spokesperson

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