Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice (CB)

My Lords, so many of the points I was going to make have been made by others far more powerfully than I can, so I will try to be as brief as possible, given that we are coming to the late stage of the evening. Many of us here know what it is like to come up against an opaque, prevaricating, evasive state. I have had the honour of working with many whistleblowers over many years as a journalist and on the board of the Care Quality Commission, which itself missed Mid Staffs, for example. Let us remember, when we expect public servants to delegate their consciences to regulators, that the regulators are also very often flawed. By the way, not every whistleblower is genuine: there are many people with personal vendettas and many people who have become so emotionally harmed by their involvement in situations that they are not always coherent, so triaging these systems is very difficult. Not every case is simple, and not every case is black and white at all. That is one of the reasons why it is so important that we understand the nuance of this debate. One of the things I have observed over many years is that the more agencies are involved and the bigger the state becomes, the easier it is for people to cover up and pass the buck. That is one of the things we saw in the Horizon scandal, and it is true of almost every single scandal that we have in our public life. I would simply warn every single Member in this Chamber who has at some point in this debate proposed yet another agency, ombudsman or committee that, in my view, that will not solve anything. It is so much easier to get to the truth when systems are simpler, and very often, with the best will in the world, we make them more and more complicated. We must get the Bill right. We all agree on the objectives absolutely, and it is shocking, as many have said, that it has taken 37 years to get to this point or that we even need to. But changing culture is not just a question of issuing codes of conduct. Others have made that point: the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, eloquently described how the duty of candour, which has existed in the NHS since 2012—I was involved in that—has not worked. I would be very interested if the Minister could clarify the Government’s assessment of that and how they think this duty of candour will be different, because I can tell them that it has not worked. One of the reasons it has not worked is that the bill for clinical negligence is going up and up in the NHS, and it is not in anyone’s interest to raise that bill. One of the many issues discussed at the time when that original duty was introduced into the NHS was what we had learned from the airline industry, which significantly reduced crashes after the 1970s by completely reforming the way in which people in that industry communicated with each other. What they did was introduce a no-blame culture. That is very unfashionable, and it was unfashionable when Jeremy Hunt raised it many years ago. But in the gap that we are identifying in this debate—the gap between the need to get to the truth quickly and the eventual public inquiry if there has been a cover-up—I would maybe urge some consideration as to how we get to the truth early and rapidly through a no-blame culture rather than, as the Bill appears to do, loading more blame. As the noble Lord, Lord Arbuthnot, so eloquently described, people are human and want to believe what they want to believe. People do not always know what the truth is or that they are covering it up. I have a number of short questions. I really think that, as others have said, the IPA should be referenced in the Bill and have proper support, and I would like to understand why it has not been. Another question is this. The noble Lord, Lord Lemos, said earlier that the Bill creates a deliberately high threshold, and that is something we all agree with, but I am not quite clear how it will do that, given the expansive terms and definitions used in the Bill. There are many lawyers in this House who might suggest that terms such as “reckless” and “misleading” have quite broad definitions, and I would like to understand how the Government intend to restrict the criminalisation and the prosecutions to a relatively small number of extreme examples and tragedies. What level of increased case load for the police and the criminal justice system have the Government assessed? Are they going to resource the police and the criminal justice system properly to record the incidents and investigate them? That is separate from prosecuting, because we are going to have to deal with an awful lot of allegations, proven and unproven, in order to get to the truth. Lastly, can we do more, as others have mentioned, to reward and help whistleblowers? Clause 10 gives greater protection to whistleblowers, and there is much to welcome in the Bill, but can we do more to actually elevate the whistleblowers who help us get to the truth? I imagine that “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” has done more for public officials who want to do their job properly in this country than anything we have done, because people know that it is the right thing to do to stand up to power. One of the things that we on the CQC board did after Mid Staffs was to ensure that while most of the board left, one of the only people who remained as a non-executive director was Kay Sheldon, one of the whistleblowers from the CQC end who was brave enough to stand up and give evidence to the public inquiry. She was accused of having mental health problems and dragged through the mud. It was utterly disgraceful. But the board acted to keep her on for a second term, which was a very important signal of our desire to promote a genuine culture of openness in the organisation. We can all think of a number of people, such as Feargal Sharkey with the water companies, and other campaigners who ought to be on the boards of some of these public agencies, because they embody precisely the values that we are talking about. That is perhaps something to think about. We need cultures in which staff feel empowered to act to prevent harm in everyday events—a lot of these things start with everyday events—without fear of recrimination or blame. That means changing leadership and culture and getting at what I am afraid my own profession, the media, does frequently: the “make heads roll” culture. It means getting underneath to junior levels of staff, to give them more confidence. It means not immediately criminalising all these activities. For that reason, I strongly endorse the suggestion by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, that we should form a committee to look at this again in two or three years. We do not know whether this will work, where it will work or how well it will work. I desperately hope it will work, but I feel that we will need to monitor the situation closely to see whether this can do something different from the duties of candour that we already have in our public life.