Infected Blood Compensation Scheme (Amendment) Regulations 2026

Baroness Davies of Devonport Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Davies of Devonport (Con)]

My Lords, my mum Sheila Davies died from liver cancer in 2017 after a long battle with hepatitis. She did not drink, she never smoked, and I think she went out of the country a grand total of three times. In fact, she rarely ventured outside Plymouth, where she worked in the MoD. She worked all her life, paid her taxes, bought up my twin brothers as a single parent, and did not moan. In fact, she was the most stoic, brave, and principled woman I know.

In the late 1970s, she had a gall bladder operation in Devonport Hospital, Plymouth. The gallstones they removed filled a jam jar. I remember her shaking them at me at the kitchen table. I was 15. She was on warfarin at the time and therefore needed a blood transfusion, which was standard practice for a large-wound operation, and she thought nothing of it. As with so many hepatitis cases, it took 20 years before the symptoms started to really impact her life. From that moment, she was on a cocktail of tablets, drugs and endless tests, yet she never stopped working through colds, flu and infections. She never explained to us children what she had, so she dealt with that fear all alone. I rang her best friend at the weekend to check, and my mum had never told her either, such was the shame and stigma that came with the diagnosis of hepatitis and HIV, which meant that so many people were shunned and abandoned. Whole families of haemophiliacs died while communities ostracised them. In many cases, it was women who picked up the burden of care.

Mum had a consultant who seemed to get things under control, but when he went back to Australia, things went downhill very fast. It was only at the very end when my brother had to take my mum to appointments that the truth started to come out. I then took her to Harley Street after she decided to pay herself to see a specialist. I sat there while he told her that, had she been referred six months earlier, he could have done something to help her, but, apart from experimental drugs that would put her in bed for six months and prolong her life just a little, there was nothing he could now do. It was too late. It felt like the third time that our NHS had let her down. I talked her out of spending her last three months in bed as she was a fiercely independent woman, and three months later she died. We got her back home to the house that she lived in for 50 years and she was surrounded by her family.

My story is not unique. There are many families with worse ones. Mum died in February 2017, just months before the first real transparency on contaminated blood. We found out that blood was obtained not only from American prisons but from prisons in the UK, such as Dartmoor, which might well have been the prison that supplied the blood to hospitals in Plymouth. It had not been screened. Worse, it was batched, long after many countries had changed their practice. Some hospitals and trusts, as we have heard, and I know, deliberately destroyed records.

My mum died before she could talk about what she had endured. She was terrified that it might come out that she had hep C because I was in the public eye. Getting records together has been nigh on impossible. I have tried, with my influence, which is better than most, and still we have had little help. There are many poor families out there who are really struggling with just getting the information.

Last weekend, I spent time online with people who have lived this nightmare. I hope the Minister, who I know genuinely wants to help, will find some of their expertise useful. They mentioned awareness of and equality for hep B sufferers and the importance of understanding how hep B can be a trigger, especially for haemophiliacs who have multi-conditions. Claim managers were suggested who can target claim types, so they can build up expertise and knowledge in specialist areas. They call for help with record gathering, an emphasis on genuine testimony, speeding up compensation, especially for those who are dying, working closely with charities and support groups which have been dealing with victims for decades, and support and recognition for the many women who were given contaminated blood during childbirth and were told not to have any more children.

This was beyond a terrible, avoidable mistake, and there was the even bigger disgrace of the cover-up. A minimum of 30,000 people were affected, and there were 3,000 premature deaths. Hundreds of thousands of families affected by this contaminated blood scandal have been ignored for so many years. All Governments have to own their part and all Members of this House and the other place need to come together to establish justice and transparency for all victims. We must take lessons from what has gone on in the past and do no harm going forward.