The NHS requires regulators and whistleblowers if it is to be fixed

The acid test of good governance ­however is not just to identify major failings in ­acceptable practice, but to fix them.

Time will tell if Streeting is up to that task. But the history of regulators ­throughout the UK is not a happy one. The long grass is ­littered with the ­corpses of ­assorted ­scandals where the usual ­ mantras were hastily deployed. Lessons would be learned. Assurances were deployed against such lapses ever being allowed to happen again.

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Remember the scandal over children’s organs being retained without parental knowledge or permission at Alder Hay ­Hospital in Liverpool, or the one over ­paediatric heart care in Bristol? Failures which only emerged after many years.

One of the current problems is that while our regulators fail to regulate and scrutinise with visible vigour, valiant whistleblowers are often scapegoated as if somehow their identifying shortcomings were the cause of them.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) in ­England (in Scotland we use the Care ­Inspectorate) was put in the spotlight last week because some of the hospitals and care homes ­notionally under its care had ­either not been visited at all, or not ­inspected for years. Worse still, it had rated one failing ­establishment as “good” when it patently was anything but.

Clearly the English and Welsh CQC ­hardly lives up to a mission statement which proudly announced: “We make sure health and social care services provide ­people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and we encourage care services to improve.” Or not.

At the end of last year, a documentary ­detailed how staff in one care home ­serially bullied elderly patients – some of whom ­suffered from dementia and confusion. The most vulnerable receiving the worst kind of “care”.

It is to his credit that LibDem leader Sir Ed Davey (below) made the state of social care ­services the principal platform of his ­party’s election pitch.

(Image: PA/BBC)

Being the father of a severely disabled son, he knows of what he speaks. It didn’t help that in the wake of Brexit we lost so many care staff from European Union countries.

Equally vulnerable are new babies, and we can recall the horror which attended the news that many died or were brain damaged as a result of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust failing to spot tell-tale signs of maternal or neonatal ­distress and operating its own policy of denying C-sections to patients even where that seemed the most logical means of ­delivery.

Everywhere you look it seems that ­nobody has regulated the regulators with anything resembling rigour. We have Ofwat charged with stopping ­water companies from dumping sewage ­despite being led by chief executives who are ­apparently so special that they take home shedloads of money. Not to forget the shareholder dividends, so essential to guarantee the level of investment which will stop unlawful, err, sewage dumping.

And before we mount our high horse over Scottish Water not requiring to meet shareholder dividend demands, we might reflect that last year alone there were 21,660 discharges lodged, a 10% increase on 2022 and we managed 221,002 hours of sewage spills last year. We may not be swimming in raw sewage but our hands are not clean.

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Our chief executive has to get along on just over £91k which, we are assured, is £295k less than any comparable water ­company boss. Roughly the same as your ­average MP, in fact, though without access to housing costs, staffing costs, start-up costs, and winding-up costs.

(Many MPs ­contrive to get the double up by ­employing a close family member as the ­aforementioned staff.) On the other hand, he – usually a he – may be entitled to a golden goodbye which can dwarf the four months salary expected to cushion the blow of an MP getting his or her jotters, as so very many did this summer.

Let’s not forget Ofcom, which has ­applied lots of little slaps on the wrist to GB “News” for confusing balance with having one Tory MP interview another. It seems to be held to what we might ­charitably call less demanding standards than other broadcasters which are expected to adhere to the strictures attendant on being a public service broadcaster.

Meanwhile, in English education, the stushie over a head teacher ­taking her own life after learning that her ­“outstanding” school was about to be deemed ­“inadequate” because of ­perceived failures in safeguarding led to a new chief inspector being appointed.

It did not lead to any changes in the one or two-word verdicts however.

(In Scotland, the Inspectorate ­apparently selects “at least” 120 schools randomly to host an inspection, though none appear to face this test on a cyclical basis.)

THEN, just last week came the shocking evidence of a Mancunian police officer kicking a prone suspect in the face before stamping on his head.

The police in the rest of the UK have a long history of marking their own ­homework, and the Police Federation, ­essentially their trade union, are never slow to defend their members. (Police Scotland are accountable to the Scottish Police Authority who, in turn report to the Scottish Government).

The Independent Office For Police Conduct is apparently considering criminal charges in the Manchester case which will of course have to rely on police witnesses not "misremembering" what took place.

I could cite the Sheku Bayoh case in Scotland, and the Hillsborough tragedy in England as reasons why some of our citizenry have lost a certain amount of trust in those administering the law of the land. Certainly the statistics seem to underline that ethnic minorities are ­regularly ­subjected to more attention than their white brethren.

Wherever you look, those charged with raising and maintaining standards seem to fall short of the brave words which heralded their arrival. Worse still we are too often dependant on the victims ­themselves to mount their own investigations before anything resembling serious action takes place.

As for whistleblowing, we can’t seem to get beyond a culture of blaming those who feel obliged to highlight ­maltreatment or mismanagement in their own field. Too often the complainer winds up being sacked for their trouble.

Part of the problem in health and ­social care in particular is that people are ­running scared of legal action, which is why ranks are so often closed with ­embarrassing swiftness.

We have had too many examples in our own backyard to be even mildly ­complacent. Women wrongly fitted with inappropriate mesh implants – some of whom have had to go abroad to have them removed.

Cancer operations carried out ­without the patients being given enough ­information to make informed ­judgements about the most suitable treatment, or even what alternatives are available.

This is not to blame the many NHS practitioners whom we know are ­working under intolerable pressures right now. Yet they too must be aware that in terms of hospital waiting times and availability of everything from ambulances to ward beds, something has gone horribly wrong.

It’s not a problem peculiar to any one nation in the UK. So meaningless ­politically inspired slogans help nobody gain access to better care.

Maybe it’s time – as it is in so many ­disciplines – for the voices of the ­consumers to be listened to with a readier ear. It’s not just the health professionals who are at the sharp end of what has been described as a broken NHS.

All of us at some time or another will need a health and care service that IS fit for purpose. Even politicians.