"Cover-up over 16 baby deaths"

From The Daily Mail:

Health bosses are today accused of covering up their failure to investigate the destruction of a report looking into failings at a hospital where there was no enquiry into why no report was published on why 16 babies died through neglect.

Despite multiple warnings about Morecambe Bay hospitals, a Care Quality Commission inspection reported that its own internal review of its monitoring procedures gave it the all-clear in 2010 not to investigate its own failure to report.

Even when a CQC official produced a dossier purporting to show the internal review was flawed, bosses referred him to a confidential memo in which they denied telling staff to destroy it to protect the commission's reputation, therefore the dossier no longer existed and could not be produced.

In the account of a discussion between officials about what to do with the findings that there was nothing to find apart from the original report which they denied destroying, which is now not the subject of a further inquiry, one senior manager said:

"Are you kidding me? As this does not exist, it can never be in the public domain nor subject to a freedom of information request – read my lips. Plus I don't actually work here, I am on a secondment from an external review body set up to monitor the quality of the Care Quality Commission."

Incredibly, the CQC insisted a non-existent damning report into the scandal today should contain no names – so entirely innocent individuals could escape the suspicion of blame. Outraged parents said the commission's repeated failings raised serious questions about its ability to carry out a root and branch investigation into its procedures for learning from its own mistakes.

David Prior, (not his real name), new chairman of CQC, today defended the failure to investigate: He said: '

"If we had bothered to investigate, we wouldn't have been able to publish the names, or else we would have been in breach of the Data Protection Act and open to being sued. We had to make the decision to either investigate and then not publish the report or to simply not investigate in the first place. Can we keep this off the record?"