A WATCHDOG should be scrapped after a cover-up over baby deaths, says a former MP who fought to save a county hospital.

Former Wyre Forest MP Dr Richard Taylor said the Care Quality Commission (CQC) should be axed over a cover-up concerning the deaths of 16 babies and two mothers between 2001 and 2012 at Furness General Hospital in Cumbria.

The retired consultant and president of Health Concern, who fought to save Kidderminster Hospital, wants to see doctors and matrons given more power and whistleblowers afforded better protection.

Former CQC chief executive Cynthia Bower, her deputy Jill Finney and media manager Anna Jefferson have been named as being present during discussions about the deletion of an internal review which criticised the regulator’s inspection of the hospital trust in Cumbria.

Ms Bower and Ms Jefferson have denied being involved in a cover-up.

Health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who called the suppression “utterly shocking”, has pledged £40 million to reform the CQC.

However, Dr Taylor said the CQC had failed totally and completely and should be axed altogether.

He said: “We should go back to placing the responsibility for first-class hospital care in the hands of hospital staff, namely the senior consultants and senior nursing staff.

“Back in the 1980s, before the market in health care came in, we did not have managers, we had administrators who did the will of the senior consultant and senior nurse or matron who ran the hospital.”

Dr Taylor said the staff knew what was going on in their hospitals and said before the 1990s there had been no failings on the scale found at Stafford Hospital or Furness General Hospital.

“The start of the rot was when the Tories introduced the market into health care and the purchaser-provider split, which was more interested in finance and targets than in quality,” he said.

“In those days, we didn’t need a CQC.”

He called for a system similar to New Zealand, where each town has its own independent person for patients with complaints and whistleblowers within the staff to go to.

Worcester MP Robin Walker said the suggestion of a cover-up was “absolutely appalling” and showed “a big need for change”.

He said he backed health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who had called for an inspection regime similar to Ofsted. But he said replacing the CQC with another organisation was not necessarily the best way forward.

It was the CQC which produced a damning report into the concerns about patient nutrition at wards five and 11 at Alexandra Hospital in Redditch in May 2011, standards which it was later found to be fully compliant with.