. How embarrassing is this for you, Home Secretary? Secretary, are you going to resign? Much has happened to Jackie Smith since she.

Resigned as Home Secretary.

Over her expenses.

Jackie.

Smith's house here in Redwich is classed as her second home, for which she's claimed £116,000 of allowances. I accept the committee's conclusions and I.

Therefore.

Apologize to the house.

Jackie, just.

Give us a few words on.

How you're feeling tonight. Following her defeat in the 2010.

General election, Jackie Smith reinvented herself as a media personality and political commentator. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Let's not descend.

But in 2013, she took on another perhaps more.

Consequential job.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Jackie Smith. I'm the Chair of University Hospital's Birmingham NHS Trust.

As Chair of one of England's biggest and worst-performing trusts, she appointed David Rossa as Chief Executive. An official NHS review of trust he was in charge of, heard reports of a long-standing bullying and toxic environment.

If senior management can't run a hospital properly and don't want to listen to feedback about patient safety issues, then who suffers in the end? It's the patients.

I and other.

Consultants have raised concerns.

About patient safety, and we.

Realized.

If you do.

That you will get punished.

Quite quickly and quite harshly.

They were trying, as they did with other colleagues.

To completely ruin your career.

In 2017, Mr. Rossa was instrumental in the wrongful dismissal from U. H. B. Of eye surgeon Tristan Royzer.

In his judgment of the case, employment judge, Robin Broughton, was corruscating.

Dr. Rossa was not sufficiently independent. There is a strong suspicion of bias, given his approval of the exclusion on grounds he ought to have known were false. Not only did Mr. Rossa wrongfully dismissed the eye surgeon, but he also referred him for investigation by the General Medical Council.

While the GMC found there were grounds for a referral, they said that referral contained a number of material inaccuratecies that suggest that either Dr. Rossa was deliberately misleading the GMC or at best that he had failed to give the matter anything like the level of care and attention required.

Not only did the GMC not take any action.

Against the eye.

Surgeon, it issued a formal warning to David Rossa.

Your conduct does not meet with the standards required of a doctor. It risks bringing the profession into disrepute, and it must not be repeated.

Faced with two such highly critical judgments on David Rossa, Jackie Smith had a difficult choice: either get rid of her newly appointed chief executive and risk bad publicity, or do what she eventually did, battle hard to keep him.

The trust's first course of action was to appeal the employment tribunal judgment, which not only cost the trust dearly in terms of legal fees, it also prolonged the stress and expense for eye surgeon Tristan Royzer.

I thought that was all done and dusted, and the trust decided to go for appeal on seven different grounds, which left me in a position that I have to defend this because you can't not defend it, which means that you have to spend another 50k or 70k on this, plus lots of nightmares and sleepless nights.

In some ways, that appeal judgment was just as critical of the way the trust was run as the original employment tribunal findings.

And once its appeal failed, the only way for the trust to keep David Rosser was if he passed what is known as a fit.

And proper.

Persons review, a test required by the healthcare regulator, the Care Quality Commission, to ensure that NHS leaders are of good character and sound judgment. Jackie Smith appointed a U. H. B. Employee who was ultimately a subordinate of David Rosser to carry out the review. She was assisted by an outside law firm. The fit and.

Proper person review has.

Been kept secret by the trust. Only the briefest summary has been released. Essentially, finding David Rosser had done no wrong and knew of no wrongdoing.

This conclusion, though, seems to fly in the face of the employment tribunal findings.

Quite astonishingly, the fit and proper person review found that David Rosser was a fit and proper person. After all of the things that had been going on, you have to ask yourself, there are things that are failing there.

But did the U. H. B. Board really have the full facts in front of them when they approved the exoneration of their CEO? David Rosser had refused to accept the GMC's formal warning and insisted on representing himself at an in-person hearing. That meant that the formal warning wasn't actually issued until after U. H. B. Had concluded their fit and proper person review.

Jackie Smith insisted that there was no need to reexamine David Ross's suitability in the light of the formal warning by the GMC. Yet a review into clinical safety at U. H. B. Found that the GMC and employment tribunal findings brought into question David Ross's suitability for senior leadership roles.

There was stinging criticism of the then-chief executive, David Ross, at an employment appeal tribunal, that triggered the fit and proper person review, which Jackie Smith then found out and established, and she oversaw that he was a fit and proper person. It later emerges that really, there were serious questions and question marks over David Ross's leadership. And Jackie Smith needs to understand why did she get that so wrong.

Evidence that Britain's coronavirus.

Epidemic is.

Spreading again. The Fit and proper person review was conducted in the autumn of 2020 when COVID numbers were surging, Birmingham was hit hard.

More than one and a half.

Million people.

In Birmingham, Sandwell, and Solihull are told they can no longer socialize at home with.

Other.

Households. David Rosser was interviewed by BBC News. We can't see any reason.

Why we're not.

Expecting the numbers to double again next week and quite probably the week after. And that means a lot of distress for a lot of patients. But at the same time that the trust was struggling to cope with a surging wave of COVID and when her CEO was facing grave and damaging criticism, Jackie Smith, the chair of the trust and its ultimate leader, decided to take up to three months of unpaid leave in order to appear on television.

That's it for seven.

There you go. Jackie Smith and Anton Dubek.

Jackie Smith has since said she agreed to take part because it looked like the pandemic was more or less over. This was not the case. Numbers were actually surging.

In the midst of people risking their lives to come into work, so I worked on the front line throughout. I can remember the first time I came in and saw that the visitor car park was empty and it was just the staff car park. And it really hit me then that each one of us were risking our lives by working through this. Jackie was on Strictly Come Dancing.

Jerry Moinerhan was a U. H. B. Trust governor. He was appalled at Jackie Smith's absence from her three days-a-week job at such a crucial time.

To me, that was an indication that back in 2020, there is something strategically wrong with the board, allowing the chair of the second largest trust in England, when doctors and nurses were under extreme pressures because of COVID, they allowed the chair to go off to do strictly come dancing. I expressed my concerns over that. They weren't listened to. The only thing I can do then as a governor is resign, and I resigned.

Now, Anton was eliminated from the competition in the first week with his partner, former Home Secretary, Jackie Smith.

Jackie Smith was voted off strictly in the first round, so her absence was only for one month, not three. Jackie Smith defended her decision to go on Strictly during a podcast.

In which.

She said that people.

At the.

Trust were really chuffed.

She was on the show.

She said she took unpaid leave and was.

Working anyway.

Although Jackie Smith left U. H. B. Just a year after the Samba and the Sequins. This isn't strictly historical. She went on to become chair of this trust, Barts, as well as another in.

East London.

Some question whether Jackie Smith has learned any lessons from what we now know were some serious failures of governance during her time at U. H. B, and whether she herself is a fit and proper person for NHS leadership.

According to the CQC, a fit and proper person must not have been responsible for, privy to, contributed to, or facilitated any serious misconduct or mismanagement. It defines mismanagement to include.

Failing to learn from incidents, complaints, and when things go wrong, failing to model and promote standards of behavior expected of those in public life, including protecting personal reputation or the interests of another individual over the interests of people who use a service, staff, or the public.

Unison have not seen any evidence whatsoever that Jackie Smith has accepted that the problems occurred on her watch. We haven't seen anything that says she believes that she bears any responsibility for it. All I've heard is her being quite defensive about it. Really, she's got to be able to say, Look, these things happened on my watch. Things went wrong. I want to listen and learn, and I'm committed to making sure that these problems don't occur in the trust that I'm currently leading in a merger. I've not heard that, and that's what we would expect from any good leader who's faced these problems.

Jackie Smith told us that her board decisions on the fit and proper person review had been overseen by the healthcare regulator, the CQC, which had also judged leadership at the trust during her tenure is either outstanding or good. David Rosser criticized the methodology of the NHS review into U. H. B, arguing it was based on input from a self-selected group of disgruntled people representing less than 0.2% of U. H. B. Staff. He said his management style was not overzealous, adding, I strongly believe that if other hospitals had taken a similar approach to dealing with the tiny proportion of healthcare workers whose behavior endangers patients, then there would be fewer hospital scandals and fewer preventable deaths. His lawyers said that the GMC found that his failure to inform them that Tristan Royzer was a whistleblower was unintentional. They told us that Mr. Rossa didn't accept the GMC's original warning because it did not make this clear and that he had no control over the timing of the hearings. Meanwhile, U. H. B. Has accepted that things did go wrong and say they have strengthened their procedures around governance and fit and proper person reviews as a result.

It appears the few people who still don't accept that serious mistakes were made are the people who were in ultimate charge of the time.