Velindre: Summary on handling of the Complaint

Informed by the coinciding 2nd October 2024 meeting of the Senedd Public Accounts and Public Administration Committee (PAPAC). 

This picks up where the following news report left off:

https://nation.cymru/news/eluned-morgan-told-to-investigate-herself-by-hospital-campaigners/

As a campaign group Colocate Velindre has discovered the obvious. Any ethical code, however excellent, is only as good as the quality and robustness of its supporting complaints procedure. How well, then, did it perform with our Complaint?

  • On timeliness, the Propriety and Ethical Team (PET) took 7 weeks to acknowledge its receipt of Colocate Velindre’s official Complaint, and then only did so in the final rejection letter. By remarkable coincidence, this occurred only one week after PAPAC raised questions on PET’s procedures with the very official to whom PET reports. 
  • Colocate Velindre’s story illustrates how the ‘normal practice’ described at the 2nd October meeting by the Permanent Secretary is so easily open to serious conflict of interest. PET’s one and only letter disclosed the First Minister’s approach to her own alleged breach of code in her health secretary phase. Now in her new power and duties, she apparently saw no special ethical obligation. Hence she by-passed the option to refer the Complaint to an external investigator. Instead she put it across to an internal investigator answerable directly to her own Permanent Secretary.
  • But it does not end there. The Director’s letter to Colocate Velindre, when rejecting the Complaint, claimed to have subjected it to a final approval from the First Minister: ‘I have given this advice to the First Minister, who has accepted it, and has asked me to write to you to convey my findings’. 

In short, she here retains management of the Complaint, end-to-end, ignoring the obvious and available option to refer externally. She marks her own homework and signs it off, an entitlement enjoyed by her alone This, apparently is an example of the civil service ‘impartiality’, repeatedly claimed by the Permanent Secretary at the 2nd October meeting. 

  • None of this is the Complainant’s doing but lies with the First Minister. She could have asked PET to appoint an external investigator (2nd October meeting paras 26, 63, 68 etc), accepting whatever verdict would ensue. Instead, her action strengthens original suspicions of infringement by false claims of clinical excellence for a new Velindre allegedly ‘reviewed’. 
  • There are other serious concerns evident from the Director’s letter. For one thing, he claims to have read the correspondence at the heart of the Complaint, yet leaves no evidence of such knowledge. 

For example, that 2023 email exchanges had cited evidence making it impossible to believe that the announcing of a ‘clinical review’ of Velindre was a mere ‘honest mistake’. That ‘mistake’ had too long a history at the highest level for that to be the case. The Director’s letter shows no awareness of this hurdle, let alone of his duty to dispose of it in his investigation. 

  • Equally, in the 2023 exchanges, she blurs the difference between a management model for the new cancer network and a ‘standalone’ model for the cancer centre itself. In context, the effect was to pass off Nuffield’s approval of the network as approving also the contentious choice of cancer centre model. But the Director seems unaware of this crossover, despite the correspondence having critiqued it. 
  • Hence, Colocate Velindre was forced to highlight further the PET decision’s deficiency: ‘your [pivotal] statement… presupposes the cancer network as the shared topic in the email exchanges, whereas only one side, under pressure, introduced this view… What’s more, no grounds are offered for this preferential supposition which underpins your whole case. This means the unsupported assumption nullifies the impartiality of the entire investigation.’
  • Finally, the Colocate Velindre reply found it also necessary to add: You say only that you discussed the issues with the policy team from the health department. This is a somewhat unbalanced and limited range of witnesses. The health policy team has been deeply involved in producing the emails we have had to challenge, a participant not an impartial witness. You and PET, therefore, have illustrated why expert advice recently given to PAPAC at Senedd insists that policy advisors should not also oversee or conduct investigations.1

1We would add questioning of claims for PET’s being an ‘arms-length’ handling. We suggest, a very short arm indeed. Tightly fixed at both ends. Perhaps, better, ‘a finger tip’s length’, since the PET director is accountable straight to the Permanent Secretary, the head of the civil service whose responsibility is to closely support the First Minister.