“Never again must the power of money or celebrity blind us to repeated clear signals that some extremely vulnerable people were being abused,” Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said today as a series of damning reports were published into how Jimmy Savile raped and assaulted hundreds of people at NHS hospitals.
“People were either too dazzled or too intimidated by the nation’s favourite celebrity to confront the evil predator we now know he was,” Mr Hunt told the Commons.
He spoke as the authors of one of the reports warned that NHS hospitals remain at risk due to inadequate checks on staff and volunteers and services should be “alert to predatory sexual offenders” such as Savile.
Investigations into 41 hospitals, a children’s home and a hospice found the free access he was given offered him the “opportunity to commit sexual abuses on a grand scale for nearly 50 years”, Kate Lampard said.
His status was “enhanced by the endorsement and encouragement he received from politicians, senior civil servants and NHS managers”, she added at a London press conference.
A separate report released today into how the depraved entertainer abused at least 60 people connected with Stoke Mandeville Hospital found that nine informal complaints were made about the entertainer but none was taken seriously or referred to senior management.
Its lead author said Savile met then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1980 and she gave him an official fundraising appointment at the Buckinghamshire hospital, which placed him in a “position of authority and power”.
This later gave him “access to a new cohort of victims for his sexual abuse”, Dr Androulla Johnstone said.
Senior staff there knew Savile was a “sex pest” but none “claim to have known” anything more, she said.
“Whilst witnesses told us it was an open secret within the hospital that Savile was a lecher and general nuisance, none stated that they knew about his sexual abuse activities,” Dr Johnstone added.
Liz Dux, lawyer at Slater and Gordon which is representing 44 of the Stoke Mandeville victims, said it “beggars belief” that the report found no evidence of senior staff being aware of the abuse.
Savile’s victims there include children as young as eight and adults, including a pregnant mother in her 20s in hospital with her sick son and a 19-year-old paralysed woman in a wheelchair.
A third of them were patients while others were staff and visitors and 10 of them were under the age of 12.
Ms Lampard, who has set out a number of recommendations for hospitals, said many volunteer programmes at hospitals still “pose a potential risk to patients” due to inadequate checks.
She added: “Our investigations suggest that most NHS organisations still do not have adequately explicit and robust processes for managing their relationships with celebrities.”
She said of Savile, who died in 2011 a year before he was exposed as a paedophile: “His status as a celebrity and a fundraiser, whose presence had been encouraged by senior managers, meant that staff who observed him behaving inappropriately or who received reports of him committing sexual abuses, were reluctant to challenge Savile directly or to escalate matters.”