Duty of Candour for Public Authorities and Legal Representation for Bereaved Families

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne) for securing this debate.

I speak as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Primodos, which I have led for over a decade alongside affected families in their fight for truth and justice. Primodos is one of the clearest examples of a systematic failure of candour in British medical healthcare. Between 1958 and 1978, around 1.5 million women in the United Kingdom were prescribed the hormone pregnancy test. From the 1960s, doctors and researchers raised concern that it was linked to miscarriages, stillbirths and severe birth defects.

Instead of acting, the regulators actively suppressed the evidence and colluded with the pharmaceutical companies. When Dr Isabel Gal published her study in 1967, officials undermined her work rather than investigating it. Later, archives in the UK and Germany showed that they knew of the concerns, but kept patients in the dark, even though other countries had withdrawn the drug from the market.

After years of campaigning, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency finally established an expert working group in 2017. Its task was to examine whether there was a possible association. The final report said there was “no causal association”. That was not in the original draft; it was inserted late, under outside instruction, and caused misunderstanding by giving the impression of certainty. Moreover, the families were excluded from the process. We continued to campaign; in 2020 the Cumberlege review was set up and found that there had been avoidable harm, that people should receive redress, and that there should be a duty of candour and cultural change. However, five years later, only one recommendation—a patient safety commission—has been delivered.

The impact on the families has been horrendous. I call on our Government to recognise Primodos as a case study—[Interruption.]

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

Order. We have been disrupted by a Division. I am expecting everybody to be back here in 15 minutes, at 3.20 pm. When we come back, the hon. Lady will have half a minute.

--- Later in debate ---

On resuming—

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Meanwhile, the Government have pursued legal strike-out applications to shut down the families’ cases—blunt tools that treat them as vexatious, even while Ministers have accepted in public that there was a failing. I call on the Government to recognise Primodos as a case study of breach of candour, to implement the Cumberlege review in full, including redress, to legislate for candour across public authorities, to guarantee legal parity, and to support the Hillsborough law now.