The chief executive responsible for Stoke Mandeville hospital gave potentially misleading information to an MP about Jimmy Savile’s access on the site after the scandal of his years of sexual abuse surfaced.
In an email obtained by the BBC under freedom of information rules, Anne Eden, the chief executive of Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS trust, accused the media of “conjecture”, claiming Savile was usually accompanied and did not have unrestricted access to the hospital.
Eden was responding to questions in 2012 by Rob Wilson, the Reading East MP, who said on Friday her comments were “bordering on misleading”.
Her comments were also contradicted at the time by media reports from former patients at the hospital, and on Thursday by an official report that confirmed Savile had virtually unrestricted access to all areas until 1993 when the hospital became a trust and his power was challenged.
The report, by Dr Androulla Johnstone and Christine Dent, said the celebrity’s reputation as a sexual predator was an “open secret” yet he was able to go about his business not only unchallenged but also with the perception of sanction from the senior hierarchy. The report stopped short, however, of holding senior managers accountable, saying there was no evidence they were aware of Savile’s behaviour, despite junior staff saying it was widely known.
Savile, the report said, used his access, fundraising and gold-plated celebrity status to abuse 60 people within the hospital, including two eight-year-olds, between 1968 and 1992.
Eden’s comments emerged on Friday in an email obtained by the BBC under freedom of information rules. She had written to Wilson in 2012 following the emergence of the allegations about Savile’s abuse at the hospital. The MP had contacted her to express his constituents’ concerns about the revelations.
Eden replied: “There has been a lot of conjecture in the media regarding Jimmy’s access at Stoke Mandeville. I would like to clarify that he was not given free access around our clinical areas.
“To the best of my knowledge, whenever he attended the hospital, he would give advance notice and usually be in attendance with his fundraising team. He and his team were given access to a room, but this was not within the main hospital nor in any clinical area.”
Wilson said on Friday: “It is extremely disappointing that the answers I got at the time were inadequate and unfortunately wrong.”
The report on Thursday detailed Savile’s unrestricted access, and how he was given a bedroom that allowed him to live among young female students, mostly 18-year-olds, for four decades.
Wilson said: “I felt at the time I was corresponding with Ms Eden, that I was not getting to the full truth. There were clearly media reports suggesting that he had more access than she was telling me.
“I was very surprised to receive the first letter suggesting that he had no unsupervised access and suggesting there wasn’t any great need to look further.”
He said he understood that the email was written at a difficult time for the hospital but “it was a very important issue where the truth – more than anything else – had to come out”.
In a statement released on Friday the trust said Eden was acting on her knowledge at the time.
A spokesman said: “In October 2012 we responded to a letter from Rob Wilson MP … We explained truthfully that – to the best of our knowledge at that time – Savile was not given free access around clinical areas.
“We subsequently commissioned a comprehensive, independent review of Savile’s activities in Buckinghamshire and we now know far more than we knew in 2012.
“We know he abused and raped 60 victims over a 25-year period beginning almost 50 years ago, we know he had much wider access than he should have had and we know that when abuse was reported the reports were not taken seriously. All of these things are known now but none of them were known in 2012.”
Victims of Savile are furious at the failure to hold anyone accountable for not keeping patients safe.
Liz Dux, a lawyer at Slater and Gordon who represents 44 of Savile’s victims, said the report on Thursday had been met with “crushing disappointment”.
“It beggars belief that a report which has revealed Savile was widely known as a sex pest at Stoke Mandeville can find no evidence of management responsibility,” Dux said.
“Ten victims had reported their assaults to nursing staff on the ward, including one complaint being made to management, yet still his deviant and sickening behaviour continued.”
She said the revelation in the report that three other doctors had committed serious sexual offences at the hospital in the past four decades suggested “something seriously amiss”.
There were 10 complaints made to hospital staff – nine informal and one formal – by patients who had been abused, but none were taken up and acted upon.
