Campaigning to free Lucy Letby is not the right thing to do, says Wes Streeting | Lucy Letby

Wes Streeting has said that “waging a campaign” on behalf of Lucy Letby is “not the right thing to do”.

The health secretary said he would believe Letby’s conviction was fair unless a court decided otherwise.

Letby, 35, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted across two trials at Manchester crown court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims, between June 2015 and June 2016. She lost two attempts last year to challenge her convictions at the court of appeal – in May for seven murders and seven attempted murders, and in October for the attempted murder of a baby girl which she was convicted of by a different jury at a retrial.

Asked if he had reconsidered his previous comments that speculation on the former nurse’s innocence was “crass and insensitive”, after an expert panel determined there was no medical evidence to support her conviction, he told LBC radio: “It is still the case that Lucy Letby is convicted of the crimes she was accused of. I know there is a campaign being waged, including by her legal team, to protest her innocence, and including some of my parliamentary colleagues.

“What I would say to those campaigners and to anyone else who’s involved in the court of public opinion, as it were, is that there is a judicial process to follow.”

He said people who thought there had been an unsafe or wrong conviction should “consider those grieving parents who’ve lost their babies”, and pursue legal routes to have her case looked at again because it was “not a political campaign, it’s a legal process”.

He added: “I still think that waging a campaign in this way in the wake of these convictions is not the right thing to do.

“Until I’m told otherwise by the courts of this land, then I continue to stand by the view that there’s been a fair conviction here until the courts determine otherwise, that’s how justice in this country works.”

Earlier this month an international panel of experts found no evidence Letby had murdered or harmed any of the babies she was accused of attacking. The senior Conservative MP David Davis described the case as “one of the major injustices of modern times”, as the panel presented its findings at a press conference.

The panel, which included Prof Neena Modi, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, concluded that the newborns whom Letby was charged with harming had suffered a catalogue of “bad medical care” or deteriorated as a result of natural causes at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England.

Separately, Streeting told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme there was “a hell of a lot more to do” in the NHS after meeting a manifesto pledge to deliver 2m extra appointments. He denied this figure was affected by the previous Conservative government’s policies.

He said: “We’re reporting back to reassure the public that politics can make a difference, that government can be a force for good, and that this government is delivering on the promises we made to the country.”

Streeting added that he was open to “serious proposals” for private investment in the NHS, including using independent hospitals to bring down waiting lists.

He said: “I certainly want more patient choice, more patient power, more patient control over where they’re seen, how they’re treated, the nature of their appointments. The NHS should be as responsive as any other organisation that we use.”

But he said he intended to learn from the “enormous cost” that the NHS continued to bear from the previous Labour government’s PFI deals. “I think there is a role for private investment, but the terms of those arrangements, that’s where you’ve got to tread really carefully.”