A charity founded by the current chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, paid 66% of its income to its CEO, a former political advisor who lost his job over a lobbying scandal.

The charity, Patient Safety Watch, paid £110,000 to Hunt’s former political advisor Adam Smith, who was also the charity’s sole employee.

The charity was set up to research preventable harm in healthcare and was established in 2019, but it appears to have produced no papers since then.

A message on its website says: “We have an ambitious research programme looking into a wide variety of patient safety issues. We will publish details of our forthcoming research on these pages.”

However, the page for reports says: “Our reports will be published here – please check back soon for our first piece of research.”

First reported in Civil Society, the annual accounts explain that the charity chose not to publish its research – some of which has been completed –due to Covid and it would do so “when the climate is right”.

Smith resigned as an adviser to Hunt in 2012, when Hunt was culture secretary, after the Leveson inquiry, over a scandal in which he had exchanged messages with a lobbyist for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The company was seeking permission for a takeover of BSkyB (now Sky) at the time, with Hunt in a quasi-judicial role.

When Smith stepped down, he said he acted without the authority of his boss and that he had allowed an impression to form of an over-close relationship between News Corp and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

Smith is now employed by Hunt as a parliamentary aide, having returned to work for him in 2020.

The three trustees of Patient Safety Watch do not receive remuneration. The trustees are Hunt, charity worker James Titcombe and chartered accountant David Grunberg. They are also directors of the Patient Safety Watch company.

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