NHS risk register debate exposes Labour’s mendacity at its worst

Nik Darlington 6.01am

Whatever the public relations disaster that will result, the Government must resist the frenzied clamour for the Department for Health to publish its risk register.

Tomorrow, the Labour party has called an opposition day debate on the issue, so keeping up the pressure on the Government over its healthcare reforms.

And MPs have been deluged with cursory click campaigns from cross constituents who want the register to be released. But judging by the tone, I’m not sure many people truly understand what it is (I’ve brooded on the detractive effects of the ‘clickocracy’ elsewhere). So what is it?

A risk register is a commonplace management tool used to assess operational and organisational risks. I came across them as a management consultant and I have come across them in government. There is nothing particularly esoteric or spooky about them. English Heritage employs a risk register for the nation’s historic sites. Councils use them to assess and monitor certain risks to the local area. Most large enterprises have similar procedures in place to manage risks.

In Whitehall, risk registers set out financial and policy risks, including contingent commercial and contractual risks. These risks, however implausible, can then be mitigated. Risk registers are therefore essential to good government.

But they are not essential public knowledge. Were risk registers routinely made available, it could lead to civil servants concealing the greatest risks, so reducing the quality of advice to ministers and causing less effective risk management. They could also serve to distract and to distort public debate, and disclosure of risks could make them more likely to occur (such as a run on a bank).

To release the Department of Health’s risk register now would set a very dangerous and needless precedent. In a letter to MPs yesterday, Andrew Lansley wrote:

“No government of any persuasion has routinely made risk registers of this type public for the very reason that to do so would undermine open and frank discussion among policy makers for fear that this may be made public before it is fully developed.

This is not an issue that the Department of Health can make in isolation, because it has implications for how the information in risk registers of this type is recorded across government.”

No government of any persuasion has routinely made risk registers of this type public. That includes the last Labour government, several of whose members are today insisting the current Government caves in and publishes.

Under that last Labour government, requests to publish departmental risk registers were refused with similar justification in July 2008, September 2008 and September 2009. That last refusal was ordered by Andrew Burnham when he was Health Secretary. Yet Mr Burnham, now Labour’s shadow health secretary, has vacillated from gamekeeper to poacher - and not for the first time.

On a very rough headcount, there are at least fifty current Labour MPs who held some form of ministerial office during the thirteen years Labour were in power. This includes three former health secretaries: Frank Dobson, Alan Johnson and, there he is again, Andrew Burnham. These dozens of Labour MPs have direct experience of risk registers, what they are and what their publication entails. Some of these MPs, as we know, have previously refused to publish them - for good reason.

What this suggests is that some people in the Labour party have sat down, thought this all through and carried on with their demands to publish regardless of past knowledge and experience. This type of wilful and blatant mendacity goes to the heart of the dark side of New Labour. It is a nasty and insipid habit that has caught hold far too widely, but particularly in the party now in opposition.

People are using the risk register issue as yet another hook on which to hang grievances about the Health & Social Care Bill. Which only goes to show how disconnected this debate has become from reality, because the risks associated with that Bill were already published last year.

The Government is not helping the situation by continuing to fail to state convincingly the case for reform. But this is a Labour opposition treating each day as if the general election is the next. And as the most electorally successful Labour party leader demonstrated, if you live out life like that, you don’t win many elections.

Labour have successfully turned the majority of the public against these health reforms, but at what cost?

This pathetic argument about the Department of Health’s risk register can go one of two ways. Refuse to publish it and the Government is damned. Or publish it to save one’s hide now, but in the long run subvert sane and proper governance.

We should hope the Government is strong enough to choose the first option, and let the righteous opprobrium be damned.