NHS medical negligence persisting in England ‘despite 24 years of warnings’

Medical negligence in the NHS keeps harming and killing patients because governments and health service bosses have not acted on 24 years’ worth of warnings, MPs have said.

In a scathing report published on Friday, the public accounts committee (PAC) excoriates the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England for allowing the cost of mistakes to balloon to £3.6bn a year.

Between them, the two bodies have failed to take “any meaningful action” to address the problem in England, despite four PAC reports from as early as 2002 advising them to do so, the committee says.

“It feels impossible to accept that, despite two decades’ worth of warnings, we still appear to be worlds away from government or [the] NHS engaging with the underlying causes of this issue,” said Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the influential cross-party committee.

He cited “unacceptable stasis” surrounding maternity care as an example of inaction that is persistently harming patients and costing ever larger sums of taxpayer funding. Reports have been published since 2015 into maternity scandals in Morecambe Bay, East Kent, and Shrewsbury and Telford. Another inquiry is continuing into childbirth care in Nottingham.

Last year, acute concern about maternity care across the NHS in England prompted Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to order an inquiry, led by Valerie Amos, into maternity care.

“The PAC finds that, as government’s liability for clinical negligence quadrupled over 20 years (£60bn in 2024-25), the [Department of Health and Social Care] is unable to show any meaningful action taken to address this and the NHS has not done enough to tackle the underlying causes of patient harm,” it said.

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The Source: The Guardian, 30 January 2026