I’d like to thank Bethan Jenkins for bringing forward this debate on safeguarding and patients’ rights in the Welsh NHS. And the reason why I wanted to make a contribution was that, in January 2012, I did a short debate that was entitled ‘Does the Welsh Government have a moral responsibility to seek to protect whistle blowers in all walks of life?’ Because one of the incidents—and you talked specifically about the Kris Wade case—is that there were people there who were trying to blow the whistle, and they couldn’t and didn’t. The question is: why?

When I raised this before, the Minister who responded to me at the time, who is the current leader of the house, assured us that there is written guidance issued by Welsh Government to NHS trusts requiring each to develop its own whistleblowing policy and that a structured assessment of NHS bodies had been undertaken by the Wales Audit Office, which sought high-level assurances that whistleblowing policies and guidance to staff were in place. The reason I feel so strongly about this is that, in this instance, whistleblowing didn’t work. In Powys, which we talked about earlier, people tried to whistleblow, and that didn’t work. And currently, I’m being ticked off by a major health board because somebody has tried to whistleblow, got slapped down by the health board, who then came to me, and I’ve raised those concerns. I’ve got a letter—which I will share, I won’t publicly shame them, but I’m happy to share it with you, Minister—that basically tells me that because they haven’t gone through the policy, the procedure, then tough luck. The reason people can’t whistleblow is because they are frightened. The reason they don’t whistleblow is they are scared they’re going to lose their jobs or their lives are going to be made an absolute misery. And, when good people walk on by and do nothing, it allows things like the Kris Wade incident to get away, to happen without having proper punishment.

We must start having a robust system in place that everybody in the NHS and other public service bodies absolutely cleave to in terms of being able to point out something that they feel is morally or factually incorrect, and have a manager who is outside of that system, looking at it and examining it, and above all somebody—and I know I’m just discounting all the malicious people, and there aren’t that many of them—