DE00000419253

 

Dear Ms Bennett,

 

Thank you for your further email dated 5 June to the Department of Health about the Ayling, Kerr-Haslam and Richard Neale Inquiries.  I have been asked to reply.

 

I am sorry that you feel my colleague`s reply of 5 June did not address your original concerns and also that it was not as timely as you would have preferred.  The Department replies to all correspondence as quickly as possible and aims to answer all letters and emails within 20 working days.  However, the Customer Service Centre receives a great deal of correspondence and it is not always possible for officials to respond to communications as quickly as they would hope.  Please let me assure you that the Department treats correspondence from the public as a priority.  Every effort is made to ensure that response times are kept to a minimum.

 

Firstly, I would like to advise you that the Department is dealing with your email as a general enquiry to the Department of Health, rather than as a request made under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, although you have cited it when writing to us.  This is because the FOI Act gives a right to obtain recorded information such as archived documents, reports, communications and statistics.  It does not extend to such sources of information as officials’ memories, reasons for a Government decision, or requests for the Department’s opinion regarding the state of the law, unless these are to be found in actual pre-existing documents.

 

With regard to the issues raised in your original email of 18 May, Section 2 of the NHS Act 1977 was believed to be t he most appropriate way of obtaining compliance with the Inquiry team.  There is a long standing discussion on whether compulsion helps or hinders a private, inquisitorial inquiry, with no clear conclusion either way.  I can also confirm that Section 2 was not used in order to limit the scope of the Inquiries to local NHS procedures.

 

With regard to your issue over the pooling of resources, the three Inquiries did not share a secretariat or legal team, although some members of it were common to all three Inquiries.  It is not clear what you mean exactly when you refer to creating ‘a benchmark for Health Inquiries’, but whatever that does mean, I can assure you that this was not its purpose.  Each of the Inquiries reported themes common to each other, and each dealt appropriately with the handling of complaints within the terms of reference that each was set.

 

The Department is also not aware that the former Secretary of State was not interested in whether the information from the three Inquiries was connected within or across organisations, as you suggest.

 

Turning to your concerns about assessing culpability, the Inquiries were tasked with investigating the responses to incidents, concerns and complaints, and how they were handled by the NHS.  Culpability was described for those failures in all three reports.

 

Finally, the Inquiries were tasked with examining the responses of the NHS, and not the original incidents themselves.  They approached that task both thoroughly and robustly.

 

I hope this is helpful.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Martin Gatty

Customer Service Centre

Department of Health