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The chief executive of BT is leaving the telecoms firm to take up the role of trade and investment minister in the government – but he will not be paid.

Ian Livingston, 48, says he has already been “well rewarded” during more than a decade as director of one of the biggest companies on the stock market.

Livingston, who will take a seat in the House of Lords, is a surprise replacement for the former HSBC chairman Lord Green, who quit the bank to join the coalition in 2011 and is approaching retirement.

In the last months in his role, Green has faced repeated questions about what he knew about US Senate revelations that HSBC branches were used to launder money for drug cartels and pariah states – activity which led to a record £1.2bn fine for the bank.

But this controversy was said to be unrelated to his departure and David Cameron paid tribute to him for bringing in investment for projects such as Battersea power station. Green will leave his post in early December.

Livingston’s new globetrotting mission to promote UK trade and attract inward investment is considered one of the most senior ministerial jobs below cabinet level. His appointment was announced by Cameron during prime minister’s questionson Wednesday. Livingston, who is also a director of Celtic football club, leaves BT in September and will join the Lords as a Conservative life peer.

The son of a Glasgow GP, Livingston’s talent was spotted early by the Dixons chairman Sir Stanley Kalms, who made him the youngest FTSE 100 finance director at the age of 32. He joined BT in the same role, and became chief executive in June 2008.

He earned over £16m in his last two years at BT as long-term incentive schemes bore fruit. “I’m clearly not in it for the money,” he said of his new job. “It’s a fascinating role and I can make a difference. I have been well rewarded over the years at companies where they’ve done well.”

Under his leadership, BT was regarded as an important coalition ally, helping meet government ambitions to replace antiquated copper telephone lines with fibre-optic cables and ensuring more rural homes joined the internet grid.

His departure comes ahead of the publication next month of a National Audit Office report which is expected to raise questions about the process which has seen BT win every contract so far awarded to extend Britain’s broadband network into rural areas.

Over the last five years, Livingston has transformed the former national telecoms monopoly by tackling its towering pension fund deficit and curbing losses at its global services division. The company’s shares, which have risen from a nadir of 75p to 300p under his leadership, initially tumbled 3.5% on news of his departure.

Last year, Livingston signed the £738m cheque for a three-year Premier League football broadcasting rights deal, pitching BT into battle against BSkyB.

It will now fall to his successor Gavin Patterson, currently head of BT Retail, which sells broadband, calls and pay TV under the BT and Plusnet brands, to bring to a successful conclusion the challenge to Rupert Murdoch’s satellite broadcaster that begins in August with the launch of two BT sports channels.

Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT, said: “Ian has done a tremendous job in transforming BT. His decision to accept a government post demonstrates the sense of public service which many of us know to be characteristic. He leaves behind him a very capable team, one which will take forward the strategy that has served BT well and which lays out the path to further success.”

Cameron said it was a “testament to the importance of this role” that Livingston had agreed to oversee the work of UK Trade and Investment, the agency which promotes British business.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/7KGS4NvYK4k/story01.htm

Poverty is a creation of society and – if we work together and have the will – we have ample resources to end it. But the first step on that journey needs to be a radical transformation of the economy so it provides prosperity for all, not just a few.

Today, Oxfam Scotland is publishing Our Economy – a set of concrete demands that will help us along the road to the fulfillment of that vision.

In the process of creating the report we talked to our partners throughout Scotland – inspiring organisations which work for positive change in their communities, and organised a series of seminars in conjunction with the University of the West of Scotland, bringing our partners together with academics and experts. We didn’t simply look to statistics. We explored the realities of people’s lives.

The first challenge within Our Economy is for politicians, policy-makers and businesses to finally acknowledge that the benefits of economic growth do not mysteriously trickle down to all of us.

It pools at the top so that a tiny minority enjoy a bounty of riches, while – as we recently highlighted with Church Action on Poverty – over half a million people now rely on food aid.

The numbers speak for themselves. Scotland’s wealthiest 10% of households are 273 times richer than Scotland’s poorest households.

The average pay of a FTSE 100 CEO is now £4.8 million – an incredible 185 times the average salary.

Our report quotes the findings of the independent High Pay Commission [.pdf]:

The dramatic growth of pay at the top has created an economic elite, which appears to ‘float free’ from the rest of society.

The reality for Scots who are on the wrong side of this gaping chasm is a cocktail of high mortality, economic inactivity, mental and physical ill-health, poor educational attainment, and exclusion from the decisions that affect them.

For decades, politicians and policy-makers have supported a myriad of anti-poverty programmes and regeneration initiatives. Millions have been spent on bricks and mortar projects in deprived areas. There have been projects to improve people’s health, to provide extra support for children in their early years, to give people new job skills, to improve their confidence.

These all have a place and are important. But they will only help people so far. If the economy fails to deliver on people’s basic right to work and to an income that allows them to properly provide for themselves and their families, then too often people will find themselves back on square one, looking with anger and despair at those who have been helped up the ladders of life.

We highlight numerous examples of how our existing economy has failed. For every full-time vacancy advertised in Job Centre Plus in Scotland, there are eight claimants of Job Seeker’s Allowance. In West Dunbartonshire there are 40 claimants per vacancy.

No matter how ‘job ready’ someone is, no matter how much vocational training they are given, no matter how hard they look for work, that fundamental economic reality denies them the opportunity to work.

People’s bootstraps only stretch so far. It is time politicians and others stopped blaming them for their situation and concentrated their efforts on creating a new economy that actually meets their needs.

So what does Our Economy look like? Here are some of our ideas.

All public bodies should have a duty placed on them to lessen inequality and focus their help on those who are deprived, giving special regard to the place of women. Their performance in fulfilling that duty should be monitored by an independent Poverty Commissioner.

Employers in the public and private sector should pay a living wage. They should create workplaces that are inclusive, that allow the sharing of work and where massive gaps in salary between those at the top and those at the bottom are not tolerated. We should create a Scottish Ethical Business Initiative to encourage companies to take these issues seriously.

As the report says:

Businesses make the best contribution doing what they do best – not trying to replicate the state or civil society – but acting for the right reasons and from an enlightened perspective of sustainability.

Business that agree to work in this way, and which demonstrate a willingness to recognise their wider role in society, should be rewarded through the tax system. Businesses that carry on putting massive profits before people, or which pollute the environment, should be penalised. They should also be denied corporate welfare support like subsidies, grants or public contracts.

Shared ownership of businesses, through co-operatives and social enterprises, should be supported and encouraged, making it the structure of choice for new start-up companies.

Our report says:

The presence of cooperatives in local economies is associated with lower levels of inequality. Cooperatives give greater influence in economic transactions to individuals who – as employees, communities, consumers or producers – would otherwise be unable to exercise significant market power.

Scotland’s biggest asset is its people. So it is no surprise that some of the best ideas about challenging poverty and its root causes come from people in Scotland’s deprived communities. But too often their views and opinions are belittled and marginalised by those in power.

As one community activist told us: “The people in power don’t listen to the people facing the problems.” In Our Economy, that needs to change.

Underpinning all of this, we need a better way of measuring economic success. Robert Kennedy famously said of Gross Domestic Product that ‘it measures everything…, except that which makes life worthwhile’.

We agree, which is why we created the Oxfam Humankind Index for Scotland, a new measure of our collective prosperity based on people’s real priorities. Government should build on that work and take it further.

Poverty is unjust and unacceptable. Our Economy shows that is also avoidable. Over the coming months and years we will work with others to build Our Economy, so that together we can end the scandal of poverty in rich, modern Scotland.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/lkgE6suY-4c/story01.htm

Engineers have warned that a lack of strategy, patchy maintenance and uncertain funding is undermining Britain’s infrastructure, and have called for an independent commission to create a long-term transport plan.

The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) said that the short-term political cycle and spending decisions were leaving necessary work undone and delaying big projects.

ICE said urgent, immediate action was needed to invest in roads to tackle a maintenance backlog including millions of potholes, with guaranteed funding for five years for the Highways Agency. The engineering body also said that the government should now choose to either expand Heathrow or build a new hub airport in the south-east.

Steven Hayter, the chair of the ICE’s transport panel, said: “In the last five years many of the most important issues – from aviation capacity through to severe pothole damage – are still unresolved.

“The need for a coherent, long-term transport strategy, particularly for England, is becoming urgent.”

The ICE proposed an independent infrastructure commission to develop transport strategy beyond electoral cycles, although Hayter said he believed the current Airports Commission was delaying decisions to suit “parliamentarians but not the public”.

Transport minister Stephen Hammond said that “big projects will never happen without consensus” and political mileage. He said: “We need to build a consensus: that’s the job of the commission. I don’t believe it’s kicking it into the long grass.”

Hammond said he agreed that “roads have suffered from a lack of investment in recent decades,” and said the government was committed to spending billions on major road schemes. A green paper outlining reform to road ownership and funding is expected soon.

The ICE said other areas for urgent attention included making buses outside London an attractive alternative for travel and unlocking the potential of cycling.

A separate RAC Foundation report found there had been a “significant shift” in road policy, with 32 of 96 unfunded schemes from 2011 now being given the go-ahead. RAC director Stephen Glaister said: “It’s a very welcome development that the government has been delivering on projects to enhance strategic and local road networks.”

Photograph : Foster and partners/PA

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/MpzeZWTco9M/story01.htm

Children who receive antibiotics in the first year of their lives are as much as 40% more likely to go on to develop eczema, according to a new study by British researchers.

“One potential explanation is that broad-spectrum antibiotics alter the gut microflora and that this in turn affects the maturing immune system in a way that prompts allergic disease development,” said researcher Dr Teresa Tsakok, who works at St Thomas’s hospital in London.

The findings, published in the British Journal of Dermatology, are based on a systematic review of 20 previous studies of the relationship between pre- and postnatal exposure to antibiotics and later risk of eczema.

The authors from London, Nottingham and Aberdeen concluded that: “Overall, we found a significant positive association between postnatal antibiotic prescribing and later risk of the skin condition. There was also a 7% increase in eczema risk with each additional course of antibiotics during the first year of life.”

But the authors also say that the use of antibiotics could be a result of the treatment of higher than usual rates of infections among children with eczema.

At least one in five children suffers from eczema, although most grow out of it, according to the British Association of Dermatologists (BAD), which represents specialists in skin conditions.

Dr Carsten Flohr, a co-author, said: “A better understanding of the complex relationship between antibiotic use and allergic disease is a priority for clinicians and health policymakers alike, as determination of a true link between antibiotic use and eczema would have far-reaching clinical and public health implications.”

Nina Goad, spokeswoman for BAD, said: “The researchers are not suggesting that parents should withhold antibiotics from children when doctors feel such treatment is necessary, but studies like this give an insight into possible avoidable causes and may help to guide medical practice.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/y5x9MM54ovk/story01.htm

New superteachers should be parachuted into areas with “mediocre schools“, the chief inspector of schools in England will say in a radical speech on Thursday, as part of a drive to improve education for poor children “unseen” by the current system.

Sir Michael Wilshaw will also spell out a tougher approach from Ofsted to schools that are believed to be failing poor children. Schools previously judged outstanding but which are not doing well by their poorest children will be reinspected by the inspectorate.

The head of Ofsted argues that a cadre of “national service teachers” should be created, employed directly by central government rather than by local authorities or individual schools. They would be sent to teach in parts of the country that struggle to attract accomplished teachers, into schools that are said to be failing their most disadvantaged pupils.

Wilshaw believes that schools in large cities such as London, Manchester and Birmingham have been successfully turned around since Ofsted first raised the issue 20 years ago, and that the children now most at risk of missing out on the benefits of education are “hidden” in otherwise well-off areas, including Kettering, Wokingham, Norwich and Newbury.

“Today, many of the disadvantaged children performing least well in school can be found in leafy suburbs, market towns or seaside resorts. Often they are spread thinly, as an ‘invisible minority’ across areas that are relatively affluent,” Wilshaw will say.

“These poor, unseen children can be found in mediocre schools the length and breadth of our country. They are labelled, buried in lower sets, consigned as often as not to indifferent teaching.

“They coast through education until – at the earliest opportunity – they sever their ties with it.”

Ofsted’s latest report identifies deprived coastal towns and rural, less populous regions of the country, particularly down the east and south-east of England, as having been overlooked by national initiatives. It also found that a significant number of poorer children are being failed by schools in areas of higher income.

Wilshaw is calling for the London Challenge programme – in which successful schools partnered with weaker establishments in the capital – to be extended nationwide. “The most important factor in reversing these trends is to attract and incentivise the best people to the leadership of underperforming schools in these areas,” Sir Michael is to say.

Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers praised the school collaboration model of the London Challenge but was otherwise sceptical of Wilshaw’s superteacher proposal.

“Sir Michael’s idea of individual teachers being catapulted into schools to help with pupils achievement will not have anywhere near the same impact,” she said. “It really is time government and Ofsted stopped trying to reinvent the wheel and just work with what we know achieves results,” she said.

The speech marks 20 years since Ofsted published its first report on the educational barriers for the most disadvantaged children in seven deprived areas in England. “Our report shows that poverty of expectation is a greater problem than material poverty because we know of examples of schools serving areas of great disadvantage that are doing very well by their children,” Wilshaw says.

Sir Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust said: “Sir Michael Wilshaw is absolutely right to focus on the poor attainment of low income pupils, particularly outside London, where results have been patchy. Good teaching across the board, strong leadership and effective use of data are all absolutely vital.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/PV2b7paITDo/story01.htm

More than 9,000 mentally ill people a year are being detained in police custody despite official guidance that such powers should be used only in exceptional circumstances, watchdogs say.

The official investigation of the watchdogs finds that some of those being detained are as young as 14. The majority in a 70-strong sample said they were held after either attempting suicide or self-harm, or indicating that they were thinking of doing so.

The joint report by the police, prisons and health service inspectorates, published on Tuesday, says that police custody is regularly used to detain people whose only crime is that they are suffering from a mental disorder.

The report, entitled A Criminal Use of Police Cells?, says that “place of safety” powers, under section 136 of the 1984 Mental Health Act, make clear that people should be detained in a hospital or another health facility to be medically assessed and that police cells should be used only in exceptional circumstances.

The inspectors say that mentally ill people spend an average of 10 hours, 32 minutes in police custody, and that they are kept in the same type of cells and subjected to the same processes and procedures as people who have been arrested. “The only difference is that they are ill, not suspected criminals,” the inspectors say.

The report’s publication follows the announcement last month by the home secretary, Theresa May, of a drive to end the use of police cells “as places of safety” for mentally ill people.

May has estimated that police officers spend 15% to 25% of their time dealing with people with mental health problems.

According to the inspectors’ report, in many of the 70 cases examined in detail no reason was given why detainees were held in police cells. But the most common explanations were shortages of hospital staff or available beds, or that the person detained had drunk alcohol or was displaying violent behaviour, or had a history of doing so.

The report says that in 2011-12 more than 9,000 people were detained under section 136, and 16,035 were taken to hospital to await assessment.

In one case a custody sergeant told inspectors that he was so concerned about the welfare of a 17-year-old, detained overnight, he had put an officer outside his cell to monitor him. There had been no one from mental health services available to assess the teenager.

Kevin Huish, of the Police Federation, said that police officers did not wish to detain people under the Mental Health Act but were all too often forced to do so due to a lack of provision in other services.

“This is unacceptable for the officer, the individual and the public,” Huish said. “This is an issue which has been identified by the government as a serious problem … This matter needs to be addressed and it needs to be addressed urgently.”

A Home Office spokesman said: “We are already working on a range of measures to ensure that people with mental health problems get the care they need.

“These include providing suitable places of safety in every local area and piloting street triage services where mental health nurses accompany police officers to incidents.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/KjS8-dQ6iW8/story01.htm

One in seven mortgage holders in north-west England are in negative equity, while in the south-east it is fewer than one in 100, according to a new report.

Ratings agency Standard Poor’s, which issued the research, also claimed that the north/south negative equity divide “is getting wider”.

The report estimates that for the UK as a whole, the proportion of people trapped in properties worth less than their mortgages fell to 4.9% in the first three months of this year, from 5.6% at the end of 2011.

However, the fortunes of the housing markets of the north and south are very different. The report shows that the proportion of borrowers in the southern regions who were in negative equity fell from 3.3% to 1.5% over the same period, with London and the south-east “leading the way” at 0.9%. By contrast, the figure for the northern regions as a whole edged up to 8.7% from 8.5% last time.

The report includes a regional breakdown showing wide variations in the rates of negative equity across the country. This shows the north-west as having the highest proportion of these so-called trapped borrowers: 13.5%. In second place was Yorkshire and Humberside (10%), followed by the north-east and Wales (both 8.5%), and the West Midlands (7.3%).

The figures for the east Midlands and Scotland were 6.2% and 5.4% respectively, followed by the south-west (3.4%) and East Anglia (3.2%). Northern Ireland was excluded because relatively few of the loans in the sample were from this region.

The SP report also found that when it came to people who were behind with their mortgage payments, the figures for the north were “substantially higher” than for the south. Around 4.4% of northern mortgage accounts were in arrears in the first three months of this year, compared with 3.5% in the southern regions.

“Diverging regional house prices mean that the proportion of borrowers with low equity has continued to rise in the north, while it has fallen in southern regions,” said the Standard Poor’s report. It added: “Given the buoyant London property market, and further public sector job cuts, which could disproportionately affect the north, we expect that the regional divide in mortgage risk will persist in the coming quarters.”

The researchers said that while northern employment had recently picked up, “we note that part-time jobs account for most of this rise … Government job cuts, to the tune of 1.2m between 2011 and 2018, are also likely to hit northern regions harder, in our view. Furthermore, given increased foreign demand for ‘safe’ property assets, we expect the capital’s housing market to remain resilient in the near term. Therefore we don’t see the regional house price divide closing any time soon.”

The study covers about 2m mortgage loans backing prime “residential mortgage-backed securities”.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/fXtpThU7w2k/story01.htm

Oxfam has urged ministers to appoint an official poverty tsar who would champion efforts to combat low wages, poor life expectancy and endemic deprivation in some of Scotland‘s poorest neighbourhoods.

The charity has accused ministers in successive Scottish and UK governments of failing to combat poverty effectively by putting wealth-creation, consumption and economic growth ahead of social equality. That had led to an even deeper gulf between the richest and the poorest, it said.

In a report, Our Economy: towards a new prosperity, Oxfam urged both governments to put far greater energy into tackling poverty and social exclusion. There should be a new duty on ministers to ensure all their spending and regeneration strategies made economic equality a priority, it said.

That should include paying a living wage to all workers, supporting workers co-operatives, increasing pay for people whose jobs had high social value, such as childcare workers, clamping down on tax evasion and refusing state aid for companies that overpaid their executives but underpaid their staff.

The charity said these policies should be overseen by a new poverty commissioner to champion disadvantaged areas, pursue socially just policies and hold ministers to account.

The job would “ensure spending decisions are poverty-proofed and support communities to challenge government policies and private sector actions that do not contribute to socio-economic equality.”

Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy first minister of Scotland, said she would consider that role and Oxfam’s other proposals as she developed her government’s case for independence.

“Scotland is a wealthy country, but the reality is that the Westminster system has utterly failed to address the deep social inequalities which exist in Scottish society. Indeed, under successive Westminster governments those inequalities have been allowed to widen,” Sturgeon said. “Tackling and reversing that picture of inequality requires political will – but more fundamentally for Scotland it needs the key economic and social policy levers to be in the hands of the Scottish parliament.”

However, Oxfam’s report said Alex Salmond‘s Scottish government had also failed to tackle wealth inequality effectively and was guilty of poor policymaking. It said his government’s stress on creating “a more dynamic and faster growing economy” as the main solution to poverty was misguided and “false”.

It said Scotland is one of the most unequal society’s in the west, with the wealthiest households 273 times richer than the poorest. In 2012, Scotland’s 100 richest people saw their fortunes grow by £3bn to £21bn.

By comparison, in West Dunbartonshire, there were 40 people chasing every new vacancy while the number of people in jobs who suffered poverty had grown from 255,000 to 280,000 since 2008.

The current approach, the report stated, “ignores the failure of decades of economic growth to change the lives of too many Scots who still face premature mortality, economic inactivity, mental and physical ill-health and poor educational attainment”. These policies “have largely been ineffective in reducing deprivation”, it concluded.

Oxfam’s report also criticised Glasgow city council for putting heavy emphasis on shopping and recreation as part of its regeneration strategy.

Despite having some of the worst health and life expectancy rates in the developed world, with men dying in some areas at 62-years-old on average, the city has transformed itself into the UK’s second-largest shopping destination, with £2.5bn spent in its shops.

Despite having very similar deprivation levels to Manchester and Liverpool, Glasgow suffered very significantly worse health outcomes, a feature known as the “Glasgow effect”.

In the poorest areas, premature male mortality was 30% higher than in those cities and there were 225% more alcohol-related deaths overall. By contrast, in the wealthy neighbourhood of Jordanhill, Glaswegian men would live to an average age of 76.

Judith Robertson, the head of Oxfam Scotland, said: “This is a structural problem caused by the economy. If we are serious about tackling these issues, then our politicians and policymakers need to make a fundamental change.

“Without that change, poverty and inequality will continue to shame us and drag all of us down for generations to come.”

The report’s findings and call for a poverty commissioner were supported by Peter Kelly, director of the Poverty Alliance Scotland. “The priorities that we set as a country, and by that I mean the UK and in many respects Scotland, are not on how we create a more socially just or more equal society,” he said.

“The idea you can somehow address the levels of poverty we have in the UK and still allow all the things that drive up economic inequality to go unchecked just isn’t possible.”

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/JO9eaQHciF8/story01.htm

The Emmy-award winning American actor James Gandolfini, best known for playing New Jersey mafia boss Tony Soprano on the hit television series The Sopranos, has died in Italy aged 51.

Gandolfini’s death was confirmed by HBO, the US cable network that produced the Sopranos, which said he was on holiday when he died. HBO spokeswoman Mara Mikialian told Reuters that he died of a possible heart attack.

The actor first came to prominence playing the mob hitman Virgil in the 1993 film True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino. But he will be best remembered as troubled gangster Soprano who struggled to juggle his family life and his career as a mafia boss over the show’s six seasons.

Actor Joseph R Gannascoli, who played Vito on The Sopranos paid tribute on Wednesday night. He told website TMZ: “James is one guy who never turned his back on me. He was the most humble and gifted actor and person I have ever worked with … He was a great man and I will forever be indebted to him.”

Gandolfini won several awards for his role in The Sopranos, including both the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series. He also appeared in the films Zero Dark Thirty, Get Shorty, The Mexican and In The Loop. At the time of his death, Gandolfini had been working on an upcoming new HBO series titled Criminal Justice.

Link to video: Film trailer: In the Loop

HBO declined to elaborate on the series other than to say that it was in development and that Gandolfini was a part of it.

“We’re all in shock and feeling immeasurable sadness at the loss of a beloved member of our family,” the network said in a statement. “He was a special man, a great talent, but more importantly a gentle and loving person who treated everyone, no matter their title or position, with equal respect.”

A New Jersey native, Gandolfini worked as a truck driver, bouncer and nightclub manager in New York City before he went to an acting class with a friend and got hooked.

“I’d also never been around actors before,” he told Time magazine, “and I said to myself, ‘These people are nuts; this is kind of interesting.’”

He is survived by his wife Deborah Lin, who gave birth to the couple’s daughter in October 2012. He also has a teenage son from a previous marriage.

• James Gandolfini video: watch a trailer for In The Loop
• Read Armando Ianucci’s account of working with the actor

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/eT0-j_6qRbU/story01.htm

One name missing from Wednesday’s report into the suspected cover-up at the Care Quality Commission over babies’ deaths in Cumbrian hospitals is its former boss. Cynthia Bower was in charge when, in the words of the new chair of regulator, the “fish was rotting from the head”.

Bower announced her resignation as chief executive of the CQC in February 2012 after a department of health report was critical of the organisation she oversaw. She left with a £1.35m pension last September after four and a half years in charge of the quango on a £204,000 salary.

Crucially Bower was in post during the period considered by the investigation released on Wednesday. In April 2010 University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay (UHMB) NHS Trust had been granted foundation trust status, partly based on the assurances the CQC had provided about the trust’s maternity services. That the regulator might have deliberately suppressed an internal review in March 2012 which highlighted weaknesses in its inspections of UHMB in relation to 12 serious untoward incidents is damning.

Since the names have been redacted we cannot be sure who uttered the words “are you kidding me? This can never be in a public domain nor subject to FoI [a Freedom of Information request]!”. Or who in the organisation realised that events in Cumbria sound “just like Mid Staffs to me”, a reference to a hospital trust which appeared to record hundreds of excess deaths and where patients suffered appalling care.

In evidence to the Francis inquiry there had been claims Bower “did not wish to criticise organisations” she had previously led herself. She was formerly chief executive of the NHS West Midlands’ strategic health authority, where she was responsible for supervising the performance of Stafford hospital. She later said that Stafford “wasn’t on my radar”.

However there had always been suspicions that the regulator was not fit for purpose.

Questions about the CQC emerged in 2009 when its chair – Lady Barbara Young – unexpectedly quit, days after it was heavily criticised over how it monitored the quality of patient care in Basildon hospital. Four years later on Basildon hospital is still being investigated for high death rates.

Article source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/uk/rss/~3/PNWTRIDmICY/story01.htm