‘Never again must money blind us’ as Savile reports are published in the UK

“Never again must the power of money or celebrity blind us to repeated clear signals that some extremely vulnerable people were being abused,” UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt said as a series of damning reports were published into how Jimmy Savile raped and assaulted hundreds of people in 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 House of 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 said.

A separate report released into how Savile abused at least 60 people connected with Stoke Mandeville Hospital found that nine informal complaints were made about him but none was taken seriously or referred to senior management.

Its lead author said Savile met prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1980 and she gave him an official fund-raising 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 & 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 paralysed woman, 19.

A third of them were patients while others were staff and visitors, and 10 of them were under the age of 12.

Ms Lampard said many volunteer programmes at hospitals still “pose a potential risk to patients” due to inadequate checks.