Q141 Mr Curry: May I come back to Mr Bell. So you arrive, you get off the plane at Heathrow and you take up this job and you suddenly find that you have a big problem on your hands. What was the one thing which made you say "We simply cannot carry on. We really do have to pull the plug on this before it gets any worse"?
Mr Bell: In May 2005 both Mr Nettel and I, as accountable officers, would have been required to sign off on an addendum to an outline business case to be submitted to the Department and to certify that these plans were ones that we were endorsing. I simply felt, as the accountable officer, that I could not do that.
Q142 Mr Curry: And Mr Nettel, you were in the same position at that stage?
Mr Nettel: No, I was in a different position.
Q143 Mr Curry: Sorry, how was yours different?
Mr Nettel: My board supported the addendum to the business case. Having looked at it and seen that it was in many respects superior in affordability in overall terms to the business case that we all but approved, with caveats, in December, we felt it would have been inconsistent and illogical not to support the business case in May 2005.
Q144Mr Curry: So you felt that Mr Bell was lacking in vision and he probably felt you were lacking in financial expertise. Was that it?
Mr Nettel: We understood the specific reasons, which were made very clear by my colleagues at the Royal Brompton and Harefield Trust, why they felt they could not recommend the addendum.
Q145 Mr Curry: Now we are little bit further down the road are you glad you did that or do you still think it was a mistake?
Mr Nettel: I still am filled with dismay and disappointment that the vision that we had and the huge benefits to the local regional and national populations that would have flowed for patients and staff, that those opportunities and benefits will now not happen.
Chairman: We are filled with dismay and disappointment at the loss of £15 million and years of useless work.
Q146 Mr Davidson: I was going to pick up that point that Mr Nettel has just made and clarify it. Are you saying to us that the service which is being provided to people in the affected area is now worse than it would have been had this not gone ahead?
Mr Nettel: We are a successful organisation. We have some of the best survival rates in the country at St Mary's and that is because of the quality of the people that work there, but it is not helped by the facilities which three Members of this Committee took the trouble to look at a couple of weeks ago and they may well agree that we are labouring in very difficult circumstances.
Q147 Mr Davidson: May I turn to the role of the Department of Health in this? The thing that has puzzled me particularly is in paragraph 24 on page 8, where the first sentence says: " . . . the Department had no strategic position on the desirability to the NHS or 'UK plc' of a successful health campus". Is it the case that the Department of Health really did not care one way or the other whether or not this went ahead? Later on in that paragraph, it suggests that the trusts, Partnership UK and Westminster City Council said that they in fact were ". . . uncertain whether the Department did in fact want the Campus scheme to succeed". Is that fair?
Mr Taylor: This is very carefully worded. What the Department wanted was a scheme that was affordable.
Q148 Mr Davidson: No, no. May I just clarify this? On the first point of a successful health Campus are you saying that your only reservations were on the question of affordability?
Mr Taylor: Ministers made it clear in the House on a number of occasions that they supported the vision for this Campus and my colleagues in the Department spent quite a lot of time over this period working with the trusts and the strategic health authority to support the scheme. The Report makes that clear.
Q149 Mr Davidson: In that case you did have a view on the desirability of a successful health Campus and therefore you would disagree with what is written here.
Mr Taylor: No, the emphasis here is a "strategic position". I agree this is in danger of causitry, but the point that is being made here is that we did not see this as necessarily a national or flagship scheme which was to be pursued at all cost. This was a scheme which had come forward from the NHS, which had been supported by the Department, which we were willing to help and that is really all that is trying to say. It would be unwise to read more into it than that.
Q150 Mr Davidson: Further on in that paragraph, just coming back, it says that they were all " . . . uncertain whether the Department did in fact want the Campus scheme to succeed". You have agreed to this wording and therefore if you are unhappy with that, you should have corrected it at that stage. How can we have a situation where a variety of organisations are under the impression that the Department's position is unclear as to whether or not they want to support it? This just seems bizarre in the extreme to me.
Mr Taylor: What this reflects is, to some extent, what is inevitably the Department in two modes. One is the Department working with the NHS on a scheme which it wants to take forward and try to help that. The second is applying, arguably, as some of your colleagues have suggested, belatedly a critical challenge as to whether the scheme was affordable.