Infected Blood Compensation Scheme

Debate between Alicia Kearns and Damian Hinds

Thursday 18th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

As the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst (Clive Efford) did, I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate. I pay tribute to him for securing it and for all his work with the all-party parliamentary group on haemophilia and contaminated blood. He puts an awful lot of work into it—it is not like a normal APPG—and we are all very grateful.

This scandal is of such a scale that probably every MP has at least one constituent who has been infected or affected, but in my constituency it has a particular weight attached to it because East Hampshire is home to Treloar’s school and college. Treloar’s is an internationally recognised centre of excellence in which incredibly committed people provide the most remarkable level of support, care, nurture and education for children and young people with some of the most profound disabilities imaginable, but it was also the place where, in the 1970s and 1980s, there was the single biggest concentration of people who were victims of these terrible practices. The reason was that at any one time there were 40 to 50 haemophiliac patients there. It was seen as an opportunity to study the disease; the NHS haemophilia centre was established nearby, and it later moved into the school grounds.

Treloar’s looms large in Sir Brian Langstaff’s report: an entire section is given over to it. It describes how research objectives were put ahead of the interests of children and how those children were subjected to unethical research techniques, without them or their parents being informed or consulted about the risks attached. As the hon. Gentleman mentioned, of the 122 children with haemophilia who attended the school between 1970 and 1987, only about 30 are alive now. There have been much wider effects, too: the stigma that could be attached, the interrupted education, the long-term mental scarring for the people and their families, and the trauma through families that has lasted for decades. This is a story of lost childhoods and lost futures.

It has been my privilege to meet a number of the Treloar’s boys over time. There is one gentleman in particular, Adrian Goodyear, with whom I have been in contact since I was first elected in 2010; he had previously been in contact with my predecessor Michael Mates for many years. In our 2010 debate, I read out a line from one of Ade’s emails to me that haunted me then and haunts me now:

“We’ve now lost so many of our friends from the Treloar days—in fact, we stopped counting at 40”.

I pay tribute to Ade, to all the Treloar’s boys and to everybody in this community who has kept up the fight, for their remarkable tenacity in seeking justice in the name and memory of their friends lost.

I thank the Paymaster General for his continued and consistent positive engagement on the subject. He always comes to these events in person, which I think the House really appreciates. I have a few questions that I hope he will address later in the debate.

First, I have been asked specifically to raise the lack of parity between bereaved parents whose child was over 18 and those whose child was younger. I hope that the Minister can comment on that point and on whether a change may be possible.

On further elements of the award, I thank the Minister for his letter in response to our exchange at Cabinet Office questions about the special category mechanism and the psychological harm payments, but I continue to receive questions from my constituents about the unethical research awards. The increase in the amount is very welcome, but in our November 2024 debate I asked how the figures had been reached, and even with the higher number I am still being asked that question. Clearly one cannot put a value on this tragic loss or say that any amount of money could compensate it, but even if the answer is that there is no way of calculating such a number, it would be helpful to have that set out.

I think IBCA has tried to engage well with MPs, which is welcome, but clearly the administration of the scheme needs to accelerate. Inevitably with these processes, things move relatively well at first with the more straightforward cases, but it becomes harder when we get on to the more complex cases. As the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst says, we are talking about victims who are increasingly elderly and who, tragically, may die before they receive the compensation they have been promised.

[Alicia Kearns]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way and to the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst (Clive Efford) for securing this debate. It is very difficult for any of us to contain our unadulterated rage at what happened.

My constituent lost her mother to infected blood. Unfortunately, her father is now in his final days, and soon she will lose him as well. He received compensation, and of course there was no inheritance tax on it then, but as his child she knows that the Government will be putting inheritance tax on that money when it passes to her in a very short time. Will my right hon. Friend give his view, which I am sure will be heard on the Government Front Bench, on how we are to ensure that when that compensation passes down from a father who lost his wife to a daughter who lost her mother, it does not incur inheritance tax?

[Damian Hinds]

My word! My hon. Friend puts it in very striking terms. [Interruption.] I see the Minister indicating that he has heard her question, so I think it is right that I defer to him to say a word about the matter when he makes his speech.

As the hon. Member for Eltham and Chislehurst and other colleagues have said, this is not the first compensation scheme that has been set up. Obviously every case is somewhat different and involves different categories of harm, but it seems that every time this happens, processes and systems have to be set up and time is thereby lost. We want lessons to be learned from this scheme, but they should also have been learned from previous schemes. I welcome the fact that the Public Accounts Committee is conducting its inquiry; I hope to hear a commitment from the Minister that lessons will be learned, particularly from that inquiry.

The last thing I want to mention is the possibility of a criminal investigation. I know that you and your constituent have been involved in discussions about that, Madam Deputy Speaker, and that you and I have both had discussions with the police and crime commissioner for Hampshire, Donna Jones. This is clearly not a question for this Minister or any Minister—not for the Cabinet Office or the Home Office; it is about the criminal justice system, the police and whether a threshold has been met. But I want to take this opportunity through the debate, without expecting the Minister to respond directly, to say that with all the passage of time, there is a premium on knowing what will happen and if we will move in this regard.

Nothing will ever or could ever make up for the multiple failings of the state in this case—from successive Governments, the civil service, the national health service and many more—but we can and must ensure that at this point, we have a compensation scheme that now does pay out in a timely way, and is as effective and humane as possible for all the victims and their families. We must face up clearly to our failings as a state and —let’s be honest—as a political system over those many years, and give truth to that phrase, “Never again”.

VAT: Independent Schools

Debate between Alicia Kearns and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

No, independent schools do pay tax on supplies. No tax is charged on education, whether in an independent school or in other settings, and that is a very long-standing principle.

Let me clear up one very important definitional point, which I ask colleagues to reflect on. There is no tax break involved. It would be a tax break if a person who had a child at an independent school and was not taking a place at a state school were charged less tax as a result. That does not happen in the United Kingdom. Everybody contributes to state sector education, whether or not they take up a place.

The principle of no tax on learning is a fast one, and once we loosen it, we do not know where we will go. Where might the Treasury look next? Private nurseries, perhaps? Music lessons? Private tutoring? What is the philosophical difference between independent school education and private tutoring?

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Stamford) (Con)]

Let me make a point to demonstrate how rushed and ill thought through this policy is. My understanding is that if a child in a nursery has turned five but the other children in the class have not, all the parents in that nursery year will have to pay VAT on their child’s nursery fees. That is how badly this has been thought through.

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend is right. That comes from the rushed nature of the legislation. The sloppy drafting means that children who are not of school age get dragged into this tax if they happen to be in the same room as children who are, and there are concerns about what might follow in other borderline cases.

The Government claim that the policy is about revenue, not politics, but having read the Secretary of State’s twitterings, I think hon. Members could be forgiven for mistaking the motivation. It is entirely spurious, for multiple reasons, to link this tax to 6,500 teachers, mental health support or anything else. The money will go into general Exchequer receipts, and anyway, 6,500 teachers is not that many in the scheme of things, given the 468,000 there are now. That is a compound growth rate of 0.3% over five years—and, by the way, a lot fewer teachers than we recruited in the last five years. Mental health support teams are already being rolled out, and they cover primary schools as well as secondary schools. It is not clear what the difference is in the new Government’s policy on mental health support, other than that it will not include primary schools.

To the extent that the VAT revenue could be hypothecated, it looks a lot more like that revenue would reduce cuts to education resourcing, rather than increasing it. If the policy is about revenue, not politics, the Government could easily commit to one simple thing today. They are confident, they tell us, that the policy will raise a large sum of money and not create large costs. Will they commit to measuring and reporting back on that, and if it turns out, against expectations, that they were wrong, will they reverse it?