Recommendation 17

The previous Committee were concerned that the Department was spending billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money without an effective plan to minimise future costs of the clinical negligence scheme.25 In April 2024, the Committee recommended that, by summer 2024, “the Department should set out the key reasons for patient harm and the actions it will take to address these, ensuring that its plans will reduce health disparities, ensure better patient outcomes, and reduce the costs for taxpayers”. In September 2024, in its response to the Committee’s report, the Department committed to writing to us by the end of 2024 to “set out the actions it is taking with NHS England and other system partners to reduce patient harm and advance patient safety in the NHS and improve outcomes for patients and the taxpayer”.26 It sent us a letter outlining its plans in February 2025.27 We therefore asked the Department what it was doing to reduce patient harm and advance patient safety. In response, the Department, whilst acknowledging that it should get safety as close to perfect as possible, did not set out specific actions that it was taking to progress in this area. The Department told us that the number of claims of clinical negligence remains static year on–year.28