This is a shocking tale and is already the subject of a small consultancy industry. Here is the Commons Public Account Committee (a big beast of SelectCommitteeland) having its say on the Comptroller & Auditor General’s earlier Report last July. It is about an £800 million contract awarded by the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough CCG for UnitingCare Partnership (two adjacent Hospital Trusts) to provide older people’s and adult community services. It collapsed after only eight months because it ran into financial difficulties, and it is now clear that all parties behaved with scandalous negligence and commercial naivety.

But I think everyone is missing an important part of the jigsaw. One of the key checks and balances that should stop Managers doing silly things is the requirement to involve the public and patients. Apparently there was a great deal of engagement in arriving at new models of care – and patients are said to be highly supportive of new services that were developed for delivery by the Partnership that keeled over. But involvement should not end there. The law is very explicit – it requires Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and NHS providers to involve and consult “where the implementation of the proposals would have an impact on the manner in which the services are delivered to the individuals or the range of health services available to them” (My underlines).

Now I think that extends beyond whether a service is delivered in a Doctor’s Surgery or at home. It covers the kind of organisation that is set up to employ the staff and organise its service delivery. It extends to knowing who is in charge, and where the accountability lies. In this case, clever management consultants, the best brains of NHS regulators and experienced local Managers failed to observe the cardinal rule that you don’t sign a contract if you haven’t yet agreed the terms of it. But might it be just possible that informed members of the public in a world-class University city like Cambridge and beyond, might have challenged this situation? Might they have spotted how inadequately prepared this handover of services actually was?

To its credit, NHS England seems to have learnt important lessons from the debacle. Reading the transcript of Simon Stevens’ evidence to the Public Account Committee, it is clear that there is profound embarrassment at this mess. He recited seven very sensible ‘lessons learnt’, but I venture to add an eighth. No procurement exercise of this kind should ever proceed without substantial public and patient involvement – and the cloak of commercial confidentiality must not be used to shield Managers from having their work properly scrutinised. We are not talking about mass public consultation but we have effective engagement mechanisms that could – and should be used on these occasions.

And, finally, many people will feel it is quite wrong for patients in this CCG area to lose further services as Managers try to recoup the £16m lost by their incompetence. Whilst NHS Regulators will probably be reluctant to bail out Commissioners who screw up, the failures nevertheless happened on their watch, and no doubt MPs will be pressing their case for some form of financial protection. In our view public involvement might have given them even better protection!