Hospital superbugs such as MRSA are a result of poor leadership, Lord Darzi, the health minister, told MPs today, dismissing suggestions that excessive targeting or financial programmes were to blame.

"It's a leadership issue," the peer told the health select committee.

"[We are] working in a very complex system, and there should be a collective accountability to the infection.

"Infections don't just arise in the operating theatre, they can arise prior to patient coming in. There has been poor leadership in some of the organisations that have had significant outbreaks of the type that we've seen in the last week."

The minister's comments come in the same month that the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust agreed to a £250,000 payoff package for Rosie Gibb, who was chief executive of the trust at the time when 90 people died from infection by Clostridium difficile bacteria between April 2004 and September 2006.

Following media criticism of the payment, the health secretary, Alan Johnson, instructed the trust to withhold the severance pay pending legal advice.

Lord Darzi addressed the case of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, stating that the trust had a "systems failure".

"It's not an individual but a collective problem. A number of individuals failed at a local level to identify the hazards leading to this tragic outcome, but this is not happening in every organisation.

"What we need to do is understand why an organisation like that has been through what it has."

Lord Darzi said that £130m would be used to pay for the screening of patients coming in for elective surgery - and, eventually, emergency patients, too - and that this would help decrease the potential for hospital-acquired infections.

He cited countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark that screen patients as normal practice, and have some of the lowest MRSA rates.

A report by the Healthcare Commission said the deaths of 90 patients at the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospitals in Kent were "definitely or probably" caused by infection from Clostridium difficile, and blamed the trust's board to paying too much attention to balancing the books and meeting government waiting-time targets, and too little to patient service and infection control.

At the committee meeting today, Lord Darzi said that linking government-set targets to how hygienic hospitals were was like comparing "apples and oranges".

"Cleanliness is not a target, it should be part of [the] everyday life" of those employed in a hospital, he said.