A NURSING regulator spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on lawyers tasked with hiding information it had stockpiled about a grieving father.

Bosses within the Nursing and Midwifery Council paid private London law firm Field Fisher £239,000 to redact information held on Dalton dad James Titcombe before they were forced to hand a series of documents over to him.

The move meant hundreds of files and reports, disclosed to the patient safety campaigner under the Data Protection Act, were reduced to incomplete and illegible sentences.

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Others revealed the NMC had monitored Mr Titcombe's social media accounts and speaking engagements - even setting up a Google alert on his name.

The total amount paid to lawyers for the redaction process - 239,871.85 - is the equivalent annual salary of 10 new midwives and nears the £250,000 spent by the Department of Health on the national maternity and neonatal innovation fund launched last year.

The sum is in addition to a report commissioned by the MNC into the way it handled the case of disgraced Barrow midwife Lindsey Biggs which carried a price tag of more than £12,000.

The organisation has refused to release the findings of the report, by white collar crime expert QC Tom Kark.

Mr Titcombe, MBE, described money spent on legal fees as an 'appalling waste'.

"I don't know how they can justify this, it's absolutely unbelievable," he said.

"They should be spending money making sure learning lessons from the past and embedding them.

"Instead they have again acted in a highly defensive way with the sole intention of protecting their reputation.

"I feel utterly, utterly let down. The NMC is a disgraceful organisation."

But a spokesman for the NMC said the organisation's chief executive Jackie Smith had been aware of the legal bill but believed it to be 'cost effective'.

Ms Smith, who took over as NMC boss in 2013, would not resign over the issue, the spokesman added.

"Each (DPA) request is assessed individually and in this case, due to the size of the request and the very wide range of information being sought, it was decided that it would be more appropriate and cost effective to use an external company.

"We engaged an external company to help ensure that we met our obligations fully in an open and transparent way.

"Handling the request in this way has incurred a significant cost to the NMC, however, we believe the approach taken was the best way of ensuring a full response."

Mr Titcombe's baby son Joshua died aged nine days old after Barrow midwives Lindsey Biggs and Holly Parkinson failed to provide him with proper care in 2008.

While waiting to be called to an NMC fitness to practice hearing, Lindsey Biggs was sacked from Furness General Hospital after a second baby died under her care in March last year.

Hospital bosses stated Ms Biggs conduct had fallen 'fundamentally below' acceptable standards.

Yesterday, the actions of the NMC were condemned by Barrow and Furness MP John Woodcock.

He said: "After all of the other failures of the Nursing and Midwifery Council in recent years, this is an appalling sum of money to have been spent purely to frustrate the attempt of a grieving family to get to the truth."

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