The government's plan for bringing down the multi-billion-pound clinical negligence costs bill will be revealed this autumn, the Treasury has said.
According to the Treasury's response to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report on clinical negligence, the government accepts the basic premise that the Department of Health and Social Care has failed to tackle rising costs despite repeated warnings. The Treasury said it will write to the committee by this autumn to set out the case for change and outline its workplan, including to describe key milestones, and the likely areas of focus.
The response said: ‘There is no one “quick fix” but instead a series of complex issues which together bring an upward cost pressure on clinical negligence budgets. The department is urgently examining how to best act swiftly to address some of the problems.’
The response notes how total payments for clinical negligence have increased from £600m to £3.1bn between 2006/07 and 2024/25. It continues: ‘The government does not accept that ever increasing levels of compensation is in the wider public interest and agrees that this issue should be tackled.’
The PAC called for urgent reform of the way compensation is calculated and limits on the costs that can be recovered for work on lower-value cases.
While the government appears to favour some form of action, it is circumspect about committing to particular reforms. Its response says the committee’s proposal for an alternative dispute mechanism to speed up case decisions and even a system of non-adversarial compensation is ‘under consideration’ for now.
Similarly, there is no target implementation date for a fixed recoverable costs scheme for lower-value clinical negligence cases, with the government ‘deeply conscious’ of the importance of keeping costs proportionate but not willing to go further before this autumn.
The issue of so-called double recovery, where compensation is awarded on the basis of receiving private healthcare and victims then access NHS services, is also ‘under consideration’.
As announced last year in the 10-year health plan for England, David Lock KC is providing expert policy advice on rising legal costs and how to improve patients’ experience of clinical negligence claims. The government told the PAC it disagrees with the recommendation to publish the Lock review and said there are no plans for this.
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