Are we ever going to get an answer to the Hughes report, Secretary of State? (Oral evidence session at the Health and Social Care Select Committee, 17 December 2025)

Summary

On 17 December 2025, Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting MP, his Department’s Permanent Secretary Samantha Jones, and NHS England Chief Sir Jim Mackey were be questioned by the Health and Social Care Committee on a range of topical issues. 

This article highlights Question 171 in the session, asked by the Committee Chair, Layla Moran MP. This concerns the Government’s plans to respond to The Hughes Report, which set out options for redress for those who have been harmed by valproate and pelvic mesh.

Content

Background

Published in July 2020, First Do No Harm, the report of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety (IMMDS) Review, set out how three medical interventions had resulted in a truly shocking degree of avoidable harm to patients over a period of decades. It made nine recommendations, two of which specifically concerned redress options for patients.

Following further campaigning by patients and family members harmed by these medical interventions, in 2023 the Government commissioned the Patient Safety Commissioner for England to explore redress options for those who have been harmed by two of the interventions covered by the IMMDS Review: sodium valproate and pelvic mesh.

Published on the 7 February 2024, the Patient Safety Commissioner set out options for redress for those harmed by pelvic mesh and sodium valproate in The Hughes Report. At the core of its recommendations is a proposal to create a two-stage financial redress scheme. To date the Government has yet to set out its full response to the report’s recommendations.

Select Committee discussion

During the Select Committee session on the 17 December 2025, the following discussion took place about this issue:

Layla Moran MP: Thank you very much. I need to move on to scandals. It is linked, of course, to the merger that we are seeing between NHSE and the Department. My first question is very simple: are we ever going to get an answer to the Hughes report, Secretary of State? It has been two years.

Wes Streeting MP: Yes, you are.

Layla Moran MP: When?

Wes Streeting MP: We are working with our colleagues at the Cabinet Office to address a whole number of issues from the Hughes report. Obviously, work on infected blood is now well under way, but we have other issues, particularly about the vaccine-injured community. There are a whole bunch of patient groups who have been failed by the NHS historically.

Layla Moran MP: Yes, that is what I am trying to come to, but the Hughes report was meant to be a blueprint, particularly for the redress part of this. As you know, there are many suffering from Primodos, which is a historical injustice that is not yet recognised, I think, by the Department as being the injustice that the victims describe it as, and there are many others. The reason I am asking specifically about the Hughes report is because that was the beginning of the process.

Wes Streeting MP: Yes, I appreciate that. We have committed to progress on initiatives to improve clinical service provision before the second anniversary. We are beginning to see progress already on both sodium valproate and pelvic mesh, but in terms of broader redress I would put this under the same category as a number of other patient groups that we are dealing with where there is a cost attached to it and there are choices to be made across Government. We are working with colleagues in the Cabinet Office in particular to make sure we have a consistent approach to remedying these sorts of injustices.

Layla Moran MP: They do have a lot in common, don’t they? There are three broad areas. The first is that patients feel unheard, which is often where the problems begin. They also want it never to happen again, and they want investigations to happen in a timely way where recommendations are actually implemented. The third part is the redress scheme. Once those investigations have been established, which they often are, patients then have to fight all over again to get any kind of compensation beyond a mealy mouthed apology, which, frankly, does not do it for them.

Wes Streeting MP: I couldn’t agree more.

Layla Moran MP: Would you agree that those are the three main areas, and is the idea to link those up? At the moment, they are just not linked up.

Wes Streeting MP: Yes, and to be honest, it is the third issue of redress that so often causes the hold-up. The reasons for hold-up are, more often than not, financial. The reasons for hold-up are because responsibility sits across different Government Departments. I say this by way of explanation rather than an excuse.

Read the transcription in full.

Related reading

• A year on from The Hughes Report: Urgent action needed on redress (Patient Safety Learning, 7 February 2025)
• Patient Safety Commissioner pushes government on valproate redress almost two years after report