The head of the Care Quality Commission has admitted the organisation was “not fit for purpose” after an independent report highlighted key failures in its inspections at a maternity unit where police are investigating the deaths of at least eight mothers and babies.

Consultants from Grant Thornton were commissioned to look into the CQC’s activities in relation to University Hospitals Morecambe Bay NHS foundation trust, which faces more than 30 compensation claims over deaths of, or injuries to, mothers and babies up to 2010.

Its independent report found that the NHS watchdog engaged in a “cover-up” by suppressing an internal review into the maternity unit. Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP whose constituency covers Morecambe Bay, said that if there was a cover-up those involved should lose their jobs.

David Prior, who took over as CQC chair in January this year, was blunt in his assessment of the findings, describing the report as “damning” and the watchdog management at the time as “totally dysfunctional”.

“I am desperately sorry that this has happened,” he told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme. “We were not set up then, we are not set up now to investigate hospitals.

“Our job is to investigate hospitals and we were not doing it … The fact is we have been in the position for a long time now of giving assurances to the public that we didn’t back up by expert inspection.

“I’ve known for the past three months we were not fit for purpose when it came to hospital inspections.”

Prior said the former chairman, chief executive and deputy chairman had all left the CQC without payoffs, and insisted there had been fundamental changes to the way the management operates.

Prior said names were redacted in the report to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act.

The police investigation into infant deaths at the maternity unit at Furness general hospital followed the 2011 inquest into the death of Joshua Titcombe nine days after his birth at the hospital in October 2008. The inquest ruled in June 2011 that Joshua died of natural causes, but midwives had repeatedly missed opportunities to spot and treat a serious infection.

Joshua’s father, David, told the Today programme that the report “lays bare a multitude of extremely serious failures, quite hard to believe”. He said the names of individuals in the report should not have been redacted. “There is a question about whether that reflects the way the NHS should be going, in terms of openness and transparency,” he said.

Farron said: “I am asking for the secretary of state to come to the House of Commons and account for what happened, tell us who is going to hold them to account. I have tried to support the families affected by this tragedy for years but this report shows that collusion could have happened at the highest level — heads must roll.”

Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, is expected to make a statement to the Commons on Wednesday.

The Commons health select committee chairman, Stephen Dorrell, said the report made “extremely depressing reading” but the regulator was now on the right track after a clear-out of the senior management.

“In some ways the most shocking revelation in the report is that the hospital was under investigation for its maternity services,” he told the Today programme. “It had itself instructed a specialist to come in to review those services but the hospital did not tell the regulator that that review was going on at the time that the regulator was considering its own review into those services.”

The Grant Thornton report describes a CQC official as saying that he was ordered by a senior manager in March last year to destroy his review because it would expose the regulator to public criticism.

Officials who discussed how to handle the findings of the review included one senior manager who stated: “Are you kidding me? This can never be in a public domain nor subject to FOI [a freedom of information request]. Read my lips.”

The consultants from Grant Thornton were informed by the official who wrote the internal CQC report that he had been told his work must be deleted because it was damaging to the watchdog.

The official said he felt he was “being put in a very difficult position” and asked to do something that he felt was clearly wrong, according to the Daily Telegraph, which saw copies of the report.
The
Grant Thornton report says the same manager “said that he felt very uncomfortable about the apparent weight that was being given in the meeting to the potential media impact and reputation damage his report findings might cause CQC. His view was that the focus instead should have been on patient safety and the protection of service users.”