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United Kingdom
National Audit Office 2025: NHS Clinical Negligence in England—Rising Liabilities, Patient Safety, Disproportionate Low‑Value Costs, Transparency and Complaints Handling Recommendations
Published on: 04 November 2025
Published by a LexisNexis PI & Clinical Negligence expertLegal News
Article summary
Background to the report
Gareth Davies, who leads the NAO, observed that cutting patient harm is the most effective route to curbing these costs. On the face of it, the answer seems straightforward: raise standards of patient safety and spending on clinical negligence claims should decline. Preventing harm also releases many thousands of NHS clinical hours and could return billions to the wider economy by reducing absence and productivity losses. The NAO notes roughly 2.4 million patient-safety incidents each year, 70% causing no harm. That still equates to about 720,000 harmful incidents, including around 12,000 cases a year involving severe harm or death. Incidents in private healthcare are not included. Helen Vernon, Chief Executive of NHS Resolution, made the same point: improving safety avoids harm, lowers costs, and eases pressure across the system. The challenge, though, is delivering significant and lasting reductions in patient-safety incidents. Back in September 2000, the Department of Health issued An Organisation with a Memory, setting out ten recommendations for learning from adverse events. A quarter of a century later, embedding that learning culture has seen limited concrete progress. The NAO’s first substantial review on this topic, Managing the Cost of Clinical Negligence Trusts (2017), and warned quite...
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