Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to review the effectiveness of legislation on medical negligence compensation.

Between 2006-07 and 2016-17, annual cash costs for clinical negligence quadrupled from £0.4 billion to £1.6 billion, and the number of claims registered with NHS Resolution doubled from 5,300 to 10,600.

As we develop, by September 2018, a cross-Government strategy to tackle the rising costs of clinical negligence as challenged by the National Audit Office, we will consider a full range of issues and options. This will include the issue raised by the Public Accounts Committee in its recent report, ‘Managing the Costs of Clinical Negligence in Hospital Trusts’, published on 1 December 2017, which asked the Department to consider whether current legislation remains adequate.