Health secretary forced to respond to urgent Commons question after withering NAO report on loss of 700,000 health documents

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Jeremy Hunt has been accused of being “asleep at the wheel” while a private firm co-owned by the Department of Health built up a backlog of over 700,000 pieces of medical correspondence it never delivered to GPs.



The health secretary was summoned to the House of Commons to answer questions from MPs after a damning National Audit Office report found that the scandal may have harmed the health of at least 1,788 patients and had so far cost £6.6m.

Hunt said it was “totally unacceptable” and “incompetent” that NHS Shared Business Services (SBS) mislaid almost 709,000 separate items of paperwork over five years, including the results of cervical cancer tests, details of changes to patient medication, and child protection notes.

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SBS, a joint venture between the DH and the private company Sopra Steria, aims to make £1bn of NHS savings by 2020 by streamlining back office and support services.

Hunt, who sits on the board of the company, told MPs in answering the first urgent question of the new parliament that SBS should never have allowed the huge backlog to build up.

The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, who had petitioned the Speaker to hold the urgent question, told MPs the NAO had uncovered “a shambolic catalogue of failure, which took place on the secretary of state’s watch”.

Ashworth pressed Hunt on the NAO’s finding that he had decided “not to alert parliament or the public” to the full extent of the missing documents. Hunt explained that publicising the problem would have seen GP surgeries “inundated” and “overwhelmed” with calls from worried patients.



Hunt did admit, however, that the DH’s oversight of SBS was not good enough.

The NAO report pointed out that the DH had chosen not to take up two of the three seats in the boardroom it was entitled to as 49.99% owner of SBS.

Clive Efford, the Labour MP for Eltham in south-east London, accused Hunt of having been “asleep at the wheel” as SBS allowed the backlog, which started in 2011, to build. Hunt said it was “completely unacceptable” that SBS’s chief executive was not alerted to the backlog until late 2015.

The NAO said the firm knew as early as January 2014 that the undelivered correspondence may have damaged patient health, but it did not alert the DH and NHS England until March 2016.

The Guardian exposed the unprecedented loss of sensitive and clinically important paperwork on 27 February.



SBS no longer has the contract to deliver medical paperwork between hospitals and GP surgeries in England.

Ashworth said there were two key “discrepancies” in Hunt’s account of the scandal. First, that the health secretary told MPs in February that he first became aware of the blunders on 24 March 2016, but the NAO said the DH was told on 17 March. Second, that Hunt claimed he had set up a national incident team to mitigate the possible harm to patients, but the watchdog said this team was set up by NHS England.

Hunt told MPs that inquiries had not found any patient harmed by the paperwork backlog. However, he said full clinical assessments would not be finished until the end of the year.