Lawyers representing the families of two of Lucy Letby’s victims have described the government-ordered inquiry as “inadequate” and called for it to be given power to compel witnesses to testify under oath.
The health secretary, Steve Barclay, has ordered an inquiry into how the neonatal nurse was able to murder seven babies and attempt to kill six others before she was reported to police.
The inquiry will be independent from the NHS and government and involve input from families, but it will not be a statutory inquiry, which would compel witnesses to give evidence.
Ministers are facing growing calls to give the investigation more teeth amid concerns it could become, in the words of one senior doctor, a “cover-up recipe”.
Two families of Letby’s victims said on Saturday the inquiry announced by Barclay was “inadequate”.
In a statement through the law firm Slater and Gordon, they said: “As a non-statutory inquiry, it does not have the power to compel witnesses to provide evidence or production of documents and must rely on the goodwill of those involved to share their testimony. This is not good enough.
“The failings here are very serious and an inquiry needs to have a statutory basis to have real teeth.”
The families said the inquiry must examine why the NHS’s “duty of candour” to patients “seems to have failed in this case, with hospital managers seemingly prioritising the hospital’s reputation above child safety”.
They added: “We do not believe that ‘duty of candour’ is an adequate substitute for a proper mandatory reporting regime, and any inquiry needs to examine this issue properly as failings here could be replicated elsewhere in the NHS.”
Any inquiry would examine why executives at the Countess of Chester hospital, where Letby worked, failed to report her to the police for almost two years after a connection was made between the nurse’s presence and the unexplained and unusual baby deaths.
Senior doctors said they raised concerns repeatedly to hospital bosses but felt their fears were dismissed. Dr Stephen Brearey, who was the first to alert executives to the nurse’s link to unusual deaths, said two triplet boys would not have been murdered if bosses had acted sooner.
Another one of the senior doctors who raised the alarm about Letby, Dr Ravi Jayaram, added to the growing calls for a statutory inquiry.
He said on Saturday: “If nobody is obliged to participate it’s a cover-up recipe. [It] might be fast but getting it right and learning should be the priority.”
A number of the executives involved in the decision-making about Letby have said they will fully cooperate with any public inquiry.
But Samantha Dixon, the Labour MP for Chester, said she was concerned witnesses were “not obliged to attend and to give evidence”.
Dixon said she had written to Barclay to ask why he had not ordered a statutory inquiry “given that there are these risks and that we need full answers”.
“A non-statutory inquiry almost relies on the goodwill of witnesses to attend. They are not obliged to attend, they’re not compelled to attend.”
The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, said he was pushing for a statutory inquiry with full legal powers. “These were unspeakably evil crimes and one of the worst scandals in the history of the NHS,” he said. “The independent inquiry needs the full force of the law behind it to deliver the justice and accountability that the families deserve. We are urging the government to listen to the families and put the inquiry on a statutory footing. There must be no hiding place for the catastrophic failures that enabled children to die.”
