ONE of the great unsolved mysteries on the West Sussex political scene is how on earth Peter Catchpole has come to be cabinet member for Adults’ Services. For a start, his background is hardly encouraging. The Conservative councillor from Horsham is rather bashful in his biographical notes on the county council website, simply referring to having "worked as a senior executive in the NHS for over 30 years, 20 of these as a Chief Executive".

For some reason he doesn’t want people to know that he left the West Sussex health authority under, errr, something of a cloud. The Health Service Journal of April 6 2000 reported that "West Sussex health authority's controversial chief executive Peter Catchpole is to leave for a new career, having failed to clear the HA's historic deficit." The key words here are "controversial" and "failed" for those not paying proper attention.

Such was the extent of Mr Catchpole’s controversy and failure that he was personally criticised by the then health minister Edwina Currie in the House of Commons in 1988. Hansard reports that she told the House of Commons she had been trying to find out how much Mr Catchpole’s much-criticised authority was spending on agency staff.

Said Mrs Currie: "I wish to put on record my dissatisfaction that senior officers of the authority did not have this information easily to hand when I asked them for it this afternoon. They did not know how many agency staff they employed or how much they spent on agency staff and were not able to give me the figures... "I met Mrs. Tovey, the district nurse adviser, and Mr. Peter Catchpole, the district general manager, today. I asked them a string of questions to which they should have had the answers, but they did not. I put that on record because it is appropriate for those managers to be asking those questions and to have those answers."

Mr Catchpole managed to put all that business behind him and has now got his fingers in an astonishing number of pies - he is a non-executive director for NHS Direct, chairing the audit committee, and an associate member of the General Medical Council as a member of the Fitness to Practise Committees and also a chair for the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s Conduct Committees. He is on the General Dental Council and is a trustee/board member of Rett Syndrome Association UK.

His most interesting role, though, is what he lists as "business adviser to the independent health sector". His West Sussex County Council declaration of private interests reveals he is a paid consultant to Sussex Health Care, which has a contract with WSCC for adult care home services. In the first three months of this financial year, the council paid nearly a million pounds to Sussex Health Care (Midhurst and Petworth Observer, August 5).

Mr Catchpole’s council role has involved axing day care centres for vulnerable and elderly people across West Sussex. Without that support, many could of course be forced to move into care homes - owned by the likes of, errr, Sussex Health Care, recipients of business advice from the very same Peter Catchpole. "Controversial" doesn’t seem quite a strong enough word...

 http://www.eco-action.org/porkbolter/feb11.html