Wednesday 22nd February 2012 | 06:23

Chris Skidmore: Risk Registers and Burnham’s shameless opportunism

Writing exclusively for PoliticsHome, Tory MP Chris Skidmore says Labour is showing 'shameless opportunism' in demanding the release of the risk register for the Health and Social Care bill.

Today’s debate on the NHS risk register is a sideshow to the main event of NHS reform, something which must take place if the NHS is to cope with the rising levels of demand placed upon it by an ageing population combined with an increase in chronic and lifestyle-related illness. Labour, who had once understood the need for reform, to ensure that professionals and patients decide the best healthcare treatments rather than managerial structures, have now done a volte-face and seem to oppose everything they once stood for, including the need to preserve the integrity and confidentiality of risk registers.

Labour politicians have tended to speak of the ‘risk register’ in apocalyptic terms, its very existence suggesting a threat to the safety and the security of the NHS itself. Nothing could be further from the truth. In actual fact, risk registers are a commonly used internal policy tool, allowing ministers to analyse a ‘worst case scenario’, without it being exploited for party political gain. Without these confidential documents, ministers would be hamstrung in their policy making.

Andy Burnham knows this all too well, if he can remember back to his time as Secretary of State for Health. Indeed, his Department refused to release the Departmental strategic risk register in 2009, citing the same exemption as the current government, ‘a public authority is exempt from releasing information, which is would or be likely to inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank exchanges of views for the purpose of deliberation’. His predecessor, Alan Johnson, did the same on two occasions in 2008.

As a junior Health Minister in 2007, Burnham was even more stubborn in his opposition to releasing risk registers, saying in response to a written answer that, “Putting the risk register in the public domain would be likely to reduce the detail and utility of its contents. This would inhibit the free and frank exchange of views about significant risks and their management, and inhibit the provision of advice to Ministers.”

It is not even as if the Department of Health has shied away from offering information to the public, on the NHS reforms. A full Combined Impact Assessment was published in September 2011, with 436 pages of analysis of the Health and Social Care Bill, from the perspective of risk analysis.

This is also an issue that goes wider than simply the Department of Health; however the opposition try to paint it. Releasing this document would have a knock-on effect across Whitehall, leaving departments with no option but to release risk registers in even the most sensitive policy areas. This would do nothing for transparent government, it would instead merely inflame media attention and distract from the actual facts of each policy analysed.

Andy Burnham knows why risk registers are not released: he himself has defended a government’s need not to. What a difference opposition makes: the haste with which Andy Burnham and his Labour colleagues have jumped on this particular bandwagon is characteristic of their entire attitude- opposition for opposition’s sake.

Ultimately, the exuberant opportunism of Opposition must give way to considered policymaking in government. Tony Benn once said that politicians are either signposts or weathervanes. Andy Burnham’s shameless opportunism on this issue places him squarely in the latter camp.