Shadow health secretary says public should have been told earlier that NHS waste firm was amassing human remains

The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, has said “serious questions remain” about how hundreds of tonnes of hospital waste, including human body parts, were allowed to accumulate by the disposal firm Healthcare Environment Services (HES), which has now been stripped of its NHS contracts.

The health minister, Stephen Barclay, announced on Tuesday that HES’s contracts had been terminated on Sunday, after it allowed a backlog of waste to pile up at its facilities.

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In a written statement to parliament, Barclay said the watchdog NHS Improvement (NHSI) concluded that HES “had failed to demonstrate that they were operating within their contractual limits. Consequently, 15 NHS trusts served termination notices to HES formally to terminate their contracts at 4pm on Sunday,” he said.

He said the government had first been informed about the problem by the Environment Agency watchdog, on 31 July.

Ashworth, who will question the minister in the Commons on Wednesday, said the government should have informed the public and MPs earlier about the “horrific scandal”.

“Serious questions remain,” he said. “Why was this backlog allowed to build up, why didn’t the NHS intervene earlier – and we still don’t have any credible reassurances that contracts with private operators will be monitored thoroughly in future so something like this never happens again.”

Q&A What is Healthcare Environmental Services? Show Hide HES is run by a husband and wife who have paid themselves almost £1m in dividends over the past two years despite the company losing around £1.7m. The company collected £31m last year in payments from its contracts with mostly NHS hospitals to collect and dispose of body parts and medical waste. Garry Pettigrew, who has run the company for 21 years, and his wife, Alison, collected £480,000 in dividend payments in the 2016-17 financial year (the latest one available), according to filings at Companies House. The couple also paid themselves £480,000 in dividends in 2015-16. The payments were made despite the company making a pre-tax profit of just £30,000 in 2016-17 and a loss of £1.7m in 2015-16. The couple were also paid salaries totalling £297,000 last year and they charged the company expenses of £170,000. The accounts reveal the couple are loaning the firm £500,000 a year at a rate of 8.5%, far above the Bank of England base rate of 0.75%. They earn £29,000 a year from the loan.



Barclay announced that new arrangements had been made with the outsourcing firm Mitie to “step in and replace this service” and said NHS services continued to operate as normal.

“We are ensuring that there are contingency plans in place in case of any disruption, and that there is absolutely no risk to the health of patients or the wider public,” he added.

“In this instance, the primary concern was that too much waste was being held in a number of waste storage and treatment sites by a contractor, Healthcare Environment Services. While the waste was stored securely, it was not being processed and disposed of within the correct regulatory timescales. At no point has there been an impact on public health or any delay to the ability of the NHS to carry out operations.”

He said after the Environment Agency ordered the partial closure of HES’s Normanton site in West Yorkshire, NHSI issued a letter to HES and gave the firm 48 hours to provide evidence that it was operating within legal and contractual parameters and set out a number of threshold levels.

With the company unable to demonstrate it was complying with the terms of its contracts, these were simultaneously terminated at 4pm on Sunday.

HES sparked a national incident by allowing large quantities of hazardous and non-hazardous waste from hospitals to build up at three of its five disposal sites across England – in Yorkshire, Newcastle and Nottingham. That included infectious waste, dangerous medicines used in cancer treatment, needles and “anatomical waste”, which includes body parts.

NHS bosses dealing with the incident made it clear that all the materials must be handled sensitively to mitigate health and environmental risks.

The Environment Agency said HES had breached its permits at five sites in England. “We are taking enforcement action against the operator, which includes clearance of the excess waste, and have launched a criminal investigation,” it said.

In a statement, HES claimed the decision by the NHS trusts to terminate the contracts was “excessive and counterproductive” and would make the medical waste backlog even worse, compromising disposal standards and putting public health at risk. Waste would have to be transported hundreds of miles to other regions.

Its managing director, Garry Pettigrew, said: “There is a proven lack of incineration capacity within the UK, which is affecting all operators ... The irony is that today’s decision means that other operators will be given relaxed dispensations to dispose of hazardous waste and that hospitals will also be forced to store waste on site, potentially risking public health.

“If we’d been granted dispensation, as we requested, this incident would never have arisen.”

The company said body parts constituted less than 1% of the overall waste collected and was disposed of as a priority, with the majority of waste being plastic. “We have a great team of people and we are dismayed that their livelihoods are being put at risk by today’s decision,” Pettigrew added.