Whatever happened to transparency and accountability! Last year the NAO invited the public to make submissions for its’ IAPT investigation, but it seems a letter from the NAO dated February 14th 2018 obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) by a Dr Elizabeth Cotton states ‘you requested information …. that relates to the decision not to make the report publicly available … correspondence and any documents sent by the NAO to the UK health bodies involved that outline the key findings of the inquiry…. The NAO is still drafting its findings and these have not been communicated to any of the health bodies’.
Under the FOI there is an exchange of e-mails between NAO and NHS England, one from the NAO dated June 28th 2017 is titled ‘NAO investigation into the integrity of IAPT performance data’ and strangely states ‘we have not yet decided for definite whether we will publish a report’. I made a submission to the NAO on July 25th 2017 and I, like all those submitting evidence which ran to Autumn 2017, would have assumed a report would be published, otherwise they might have considered it a waste of energy!
I have e-mailed the NAO and await a reply.
Dr Mike Scott