Covid-19: Lockdown Costs and Benefits

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Wednesday 13th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I am sure the Minister would agree that policy-making is best done based on hard evidence rather than on opinion and speculation. In that respect, can she say whether the Government will publish a review independent of the inquiry of all the many academic studies taking place on the impact of lockdowns in the UK and elsewhere? And—who knows?—whichever side we start on, some of us may even change our minds on the basis of reading such a study.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I agree that hard evidence is important and I too value academic studies. A lot of academic studies and reviews of the pandemic in other countries have already been published and are generally available. We are focusing on responding to the Covid inquiry. Clearly, we hope that it will cover all these different points and make sure that future pandemics are tackled as expeditiously and as well as possible, looking at the broader impacts.

AI-generated Public Services

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I very much agree that, to ensure public trust, you want services that are accessible by design. Coming from the retail sector, I have a slightly less rosy view of labelling. Like earlier data changes, AI is part of a continuum of technological change. The key thing is to have proper arrangements, such as, for example, the AI Safety Institute, which we have now set up following the Prime Minister’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park with international partners. This is to make sure that we are aware of what is happening, because there are opportunities as well as risks to AI. I have a whole list of opportunities, which we can go through, but I would like to hear some more questions.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I will follow up the Minister’s previous answer. The public sector can benefit from many kinds of artificial intelligence that are a long way from the image of a killer robot threat to mankind, which often features heavily in the public debate. AI can improve hospital bed management, care worker rostering, public procurement and many other dull but very valuable tasks. Does the Minister share my concern that the killer robot narrative may overshadow the adoption of these much less controversial AI systems? What are the Government doing to encourage and accelerate their deployment?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I do not think that list is dull. I have other examples, such as the world-leading child abuse image database, which the Home Office is working on. My son, as a detective in the Met, thinks it will be a marvellous opportunity to make the police’s job easier and less awful. The noble Lord is right that the robot vision has to be moderated by an understanding of the usefulness of AI on many things, such as conversational front ends to public services on GOV.UK. These things will make life easier and more accessible, which is why it is good that we are debating them and can reassure people. Of course there are fears, which is one of the reasons why we are working on guidance on frontier AI—that is in the pipeline.

Elgin Marbles

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I wanted to take part in this debate because I love ancient artefacts—so much so that my career began in ruins, working as a field archaeologist, trowel in hand. Please indulge me; it is panto season. Even now I feel a shiver of excitement at the memory of scraping back the dirt to reveal a sarcophagus lid and then lifting it to find the tomb still occupied in skeletal form. What is special about artefacts is that they conjure up stories when we see, touch or smell them. The sniffing part does not apply to skeletons—that would be weird—but there is nothing like a whiff of old alabaster. It is this story-telling function that I believe should be front of mind when we consider objects such as the Parthenon sculptures, recognising, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, that location and context are important elements in how they speak to us.

As I have bounced between the British Museum and the new Acropolis Museum, each of which holds around half the surviving Parthenon sculptures, I have felt two quite different narratives emerge from these kindred objects. In London, the story is heavily weighted in favour of their recent history. They speak of 19th-century adventurers, of the neoclassical London architecture they influenced, of a Britain that prized Latin and Greek education above all else, and of a world of comparative cultural and artistic studies. In Athens, the story is very much one of them as integral architectural features of the Parthenon building that you can see from the gallery, of their position relative to other layers of Greek archaeology and of their representation of classical Athenian culture. One of the most powerful differences is in their positioning. The Duveen Gallery has them facing inwards while the new Acropolis Museum has them turned outwards, replicating their original arrangement on the Parthenon. They are, quite literally, introverted in London and extroverted in Athens.

I hope we can recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, set out, that each of these stories is interesting and valuable, and do not allow a lack of imagination to cause us to dismiss either of them out of hand. My personal preference, as my tone may have given away, is for the Athenian story, so I wish to see the entire set of sculptures together in the new Acropolis Museum. But I recognise that this would represent a loss to those who favour the London narrative, if they can no longer drop into the British Museum for a fix of their own preferred kind of classical inspiration.

Artefacts also add new elements to their stories over time; this is especially true for the Parthenon sculptures. As well as Lord Elgin himself, their story now includes Melina Mercouri, who kicked off that campaign 40 years ago, and Eleni Cubitt, who ran the UK campaign for their return over many years. Our current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has now become part of the story; George Osborne may be an even bigger figure if he leads the trustees to agree to some form of display in Athens. It is certainly my hope that we will find a way to have the entire set of sculptures singing their story out from the new Acropolis Museum, while the British Museum continues to tell its rich stories through other fabulous Greek objects from its own collection or from loans.

Our Prime Minister recently issued a clarion call for politicians not to feel bound by others’ past decisions, but rather to be willing to make

“long-term decisions for a brighter future”.

That question now sits in front of the British Museum trustees. If it seems better for the next chapter of the sculptures’ story to be set in Athens, I hope we can enable that to happen.

I invite the Minister to give an aesthetic opinion, as well as the legalistic ones that I suspect he has in his notes. It would be helpful for the House to know the personal preference of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, for Parthenon placement.

Living in a COVID World: A Long-term Approach to Resilience and Wellbeing (COVID-19 Committee Report)

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the committee for a thought-provoking report. My comments will reflect reactions to some of the recommendations within it.

I start with recommendation 1, not just logically because it is at the beginning but also because it is significant. It identifies the importance when looking at health issues of considering both the population and each individual within it. Our state of health at any moment reflects each individual’s life story. It is a combination of their genetic inheritance with socio- economic factors, their professional role—in Covid, certain jobs brought with them a different risk than other jobs—long-term health conditions, the language they speak, as the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, pointed out, dire lifestyle factors and just a dose of good old-fashioned good or bad luck. All those factors affected each individual’s experience of Covid, and no two individuals had the same experience: both in their literal health experience, whether they were likely to suffer ill health and perhaps even death, and in their experience of lockdown and their professional and personal lives.

Covid hit people differently, and some of those differences turn out to be predictable—not the luck factors, but for some of those other factors we can say, “That tells us that your experience of a particular disease or health outcome will be different”. The report pulled that out and said that socioeconomic factors will have an impact over time, not just for Covid but for other diseases. Now that we have that awareness, it is important that we do not let it slip and just go back to thinking of the population as a whole, because those population-based statistics mask all those critical individual life experiences. We need to plan to minimise population risk and be acutely sensitive to whether we have exaggerated risks within certain segments of the population that could and should be addressed by health and other broader public policies.

The Government’s response talks about the work of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, and that is a useful approach. However, it is useful only if it continues this focus on the individual rather than masking those individual outcomes in the broad statistical outcomes that it is seeking. The proof of the learning will be in whether we understand future crises and respond much more quickly to those differential individual risks. I hope the Minister will be able to talk about that.

The second recommendation that jumped out at me as really insightful was recommendation 3, on local capabilities. It is important to reflect on that. I would have said that there was already enough evidence to suggest that we did not make sufficient use of local public health services; we brought everything to the centre very quickly and left people on the ground in public health services feeling that there was no role for them, and we did not take advantage of what they could offer. As we get output from the various inquiries that are going on, we will dig into that some more, particularly on the test and trace programme, which the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, touched on. We have to be really honest about the difference when we brought something centrally and the impact that that had on demotivating local programmes.

The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, talked about the rules and people’s immediate reaction. I thought about that as I reflected on the experience—I do not know whether anyone else had this experience—of people from centralised test and trace ringing up people in your household to tell them about your Covid, which you had already told them about because that is what people do. I learned that the best way to do test and trace was to WhatsApp all the people I knew when I had a positive test result, because that was the quickest way to get to them. Again, 10 days later somebody would phone to tell you something that you had already dealt with. The phrase “common sense” gets bandied around, but people are sensible and those very local responses were often super useful. In some ways, they were disempowered by bringing everything into the centre.

What was telling about the Scottish and Welsh experience was that people were looking to local leaders. That happened to a certain extent with some of the English regions, but it left me thinking about how much more we could have had of that if we had said that there was a role for local council leaders and others and asked them to stand up, be visible and give the advice about WhatsApping all your friends if you got a positive test result. We could have seen the impact of that, rather than getting a call from an impersonal call centre in a language that you did not even understand. As the report highlights, there was a huge opportunity to do so much more through local institutions.

We are now starting to see certain elements of the dysfunction going on in central government. Back in the day, I was a representative in Sheffield from the minority party, because most politicians in Sheffield had been Labour since time immemorial. I found in a local situation that those local loyalties far outweighed party loyalty, and we would work together very effectively. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London talked about faith leaders—there was a real sense that we all had to help Sheffield, whatever our religion or party. It felt to me that we could have drawn on much more of that, but people were disempowered because it was all going back to those press conferences in London and people from there telling you what you should do.

Local knowledge is also critical but was missed. If you want to know where you should put a testing centre which people will find easy to get to, you ask people in the area. There were people sitting here in Whitehall saying, “The testing centre should go there”, because it looks good on the map—but if you asked anyone locally, they would have told you that no one ever wanted to go down that street, for whatever local reason. We missed all those opportunities. I hope the Minister can at least give us some indication that any future planning will be much more sensitive to and take advantage of the fact that we have amazing local structures that can be utilised in such a crisis.

On recommendations 7 and 9 on long-term planning and efficiency, what happened around procurement is a stark example of why that is needed. We saw the best and worst in the pandemic: we saw people pitching in for the public interest, but we also saw blatant profiteering. As the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, pointed out, part of it is the redundancy question. If you have taken everything down to the bone, you have made yourself more vulnerable to those who will come along and sell you something, because you have to buy it at any price. There was no cushion there, and cushions matter if you want to insulate yourself against that kind of situation.

This is also about planning and advance frameworks for procurement and staffing. Whether it is procuring equipment or staffing, this is squarely in the domain of the Cabinet Office and it could be thinking now about how we avoid that, whether it is a health emergency or any other situation where we have an urgent need to procure people and stuff in the public interest. How do we make sure that we do not expose ourselves to that profiteering? I think that I am safe in this environment to use this reference, but there will always be Private Walkers—that famous figure, the spiv from “Dad’s Army”, for those who are not of that generation. There will always be somebody. Since time immemorial, there have always been people who will take advantage, but we can do things to protect ourselves against that. Part of that might be the Cabinet Office thinking about what kind of profit limits would be appropriate. People can make profit, that is fine—we want them to be creative and think of new solutions—but there should be limits to that, which is something that could be thought about ahead of time.

Transparency rules would be helpful. We are told that a lot of those contracts were commercial, so it is now really difficult to unpick that and to understand whether people were profiteering or just charging a fair mark-up, which would have been fine. If they delivered the goods and charged a fair mark-up, we are okay, but if they were putting on an excess mark-up because they knew that they could take advantage, they were being Private Walkers. We need to know that and be able to dig into it. That area is really significant, and I hope that the Minister will be able to say that this is a priority for the Cabinet Office.

The last set of recommendations that jumped out at me are 16 and 17, on online activity generally, and 21 and 22, on digital health in particular. We had a huge, forced learning process. My noble friend Lord Alderdice talked about our late Queen, who also had to learn; she was forced into the situation of learning how to do digital signing. During that crisis, all of us were forced to do things digitally. The technology held up remarkably well, in fact. I was quite surprised—I think the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who has a lot of experience, may have shared my surprise. I thought that we would break the internet with that massive usage, but we did not. However, because the technology held up quite well, in some ways it masked a whole bunch of social questions that we were not asking. The real questions were not necessarily the technological ones, other than for those who did not have access at all. For most people who had access, there were a range of social questions that, in some ways, were much more significant than the technology.

Any parent whose children went through Covid—mine did—will certainly recognise that the impact was significant, even where the technology worked perfectly and even where the schools were good. It was not zero impact. Mine still talk about it; they were not in exam years but it is still relevant to their experience of education today and how they feel about education.

There is also a risk that the debate becomes binary; it is either all offline or all online—whether that is health, education or work. My noble friend Lord Alderdice and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, referred to GP consultations, and there is almost this sense that we need to move everything online or we need to get everything offline, when the world is much more complicated than that. The reality is that it is about individuals who have individual needs and individual preferences. There will be some children who struggle in school social settings—and always have done. A lot of them were absent from school, and online is a wonderful bonus. I can remember going back and dealing with children who were persistently truant from school, and were truant because they genuinely struggled. Online may be a better solution for those individuals. There are other children who really struggle by not being in school, for whom online is a terrible experience. We need, again, to recognise that. It is hard for those who are delivering education—it is much harder than a single model—but, if we want to respond to people’s needs, we need to think about how we are going to do that.

In the healthcare sector, there are many people who will benefit from virtual wards—another development that has come out of all this—and who would rather be at home than in a hospital setting. There will be others, however, for whom being in hospital is essential—often for socioeconomic factors—and at home they just would not get the care that they need. It is not one size fits all. It is not all virtual or all in hospital; it is about reflecting the individual circumstances. The Government’s response to the report talks about the need for new medical systems to be approved by the MHRA. That is right but, again, the risk is that we focus on the technology. Approving the technology as suitable for home use is one thing, but approving the protocols that decide when you use the technology versus when you use in-person is a whole other set of questions that we need to address.

I am grateful to the committee for a very comprehensive report with so much thought-provoking content. I have touched on a few points but I read the other reports with great interest and will learn a lot from them. If we can learn these lessons, we can be better equipped for future crises of all kinds that we are going to face. It will be deeply disappointing if we hit another crisis and do not do better. There is no excuse for not doing better if we take on board these lessons. I am grateful to the committee for giving us the opportunity to focus on the kind of things that we could do to achieve that better outcome.

Nuclear Test Veterans

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right that the rollout of the medals has been a little slower than we had expected. We were keen to make progress on this, and we announced last November that the medal would be given to these brave veterans. Others will know that it takes time to design, improve and manufacture a new medal. However, I am absolutely determined—and Johnny Mercer, the Veterans Minister, who everybody will no doubt know, is determined—that we will do everything we can to make those medals available on the chests of veterans on Remembrance Sunday.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, further to the Minister’s exchanges with the noble Lord, Lord Watson, will she clarify that the Government believe that nuclear test veterans have an absolute right to access any records of tests from samples they have given over the years? Will the Government assist those individuals who are having to follow up the claims themselves, when they believe that medical records are being withheld?

Covid-19 Inquiry: Judicial Review

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Tuesday 6th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, before I start, I will just emphasise the point made by the noble Lord that it is unusual when business says

“at a convenient time after 7.30 pm”

to be starting closer to 8.30 pm. I wondered whether the Government were trying to delay it because the Minister did not want to answer questions.

Where I suspect the Government and I would agree is that Ministers, politicians and officials need private time and space to explore and discuss issues as they develop policy, but that is not what the Government’s legal action in this Statement is about. There were basically two reasons why the Government launched this inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic. The first was to learn lessons from what was done well, what went wrong and what changes could be made for us to be better prepared and to better respond to such events in future. For there to be trust in government for any similar event in future, we must ensure we are able to respond effectively.

Secondly, the inquiry was about trust, responsibility and accountability. Many questions have been raised since; for example, about preparedness beforehand, the supply and purchase of PPE and the disputes the Government had about scientific advice, and the view from the Government was that an independent, judge-led inquiry was the most appropriate way forward. To this end, the Government chose a highly regarded former judge, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett. I am giving some background on this because in your Lordships’ House we do not now benefit from hearing a Minister read a Statement out, so it is somewhat awkward for those listening to know what is going on. Normally, I would just have questions, but I think it is important to set on record some of the scene, which should be the Government’s job.

The Government chose a highly respected former judge, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, but what appears to be the case—I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on this—is that the terms of reference for that inquiry and the timescale in which it was to be expedited were not fully formed and there is now a dispute between the Government and the inquiry. We now have a rather embarrassing position where the Government are seeking a judicial review to, in their own words, test

“the core point of principle”

of who decides whether there are limits on information that an inquiry can request. The Government’s argument is that this applies only to documents that are “unambiguously irrelevant” and that this is a test case. It has been admitted by a Minister that the Government expect to lose the case but, apparently, even then, it is important to test the point of principle in the court with the taxpayer footing in Bill.

I have a number of questions for the Minister. What discussions were there between the Government and government representatives and the inquiry prior to the application for judicial review? In other words, was there any attempt to resolve this more sensibly? Can she confirm that the inquiry is being conducted under the Inquiries Act 2005? Is she confident that a judicial review is compliant with the entirety of that legislation? If so, on what grounds are the Government seeking judicial review? If, as the Government have previously confirmed, there are well over 20 million documents that could be relevant yet so far only 55,000 have been provided to the inquiry, have they made any assessment, should they be successful in the case, of the timescale for assessing those documents—whether or not the Government consider they are relevant to the inquiry—and what are the criteria for those documents being assessed as relevant? Was that ever discussed prior to the judicial review with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett?

I think the important question is whether it is true that the Government have told the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, that if he rocks the boat on this inquiry, they will stop paying his legal costs. The Minister huffs and puffs at me, but this has been raised in the press—it has been discussed quite openly—and I think it would be helpful in your Lordships’ House to get an accurate assessment of whether that has been the case or has been discussed, and whether there has been any discussion at government level of that kind of tit-for-tat approach.

As regards the type of documents and information requested, can the Minister say how many of those communications were by WhatsApp? The reason I raise that is that we have discussed this WhatsApp issue before, and there are real concerns that Ministers have been far too casual about communications through private messages and social media platforms, mixing up what is appropriate government business with what is just gossip and chit-chat. I can understand that Ministers may be concerned about the public reaction to the banality of some of those messages, as the Hancock exposé revealed, but the Minister has to understand that this just fuels suspicion that this judicial review is more about protecting reputations than learning the lessons of what happened during the pandemic.

I hope the Minister understands that there are real fears that, by their action, the Government could undermine the very purpose of the inquiry. If it is felt that information has been withheld or suppressed, then one of the key objectives—public trust—will have been undermined, with damaging consequences not just for our politics but for confidence in any measures that may be required if and when we face another major public health event. Other countries have already reported on their investigations; all these delays mean there is a danger that by the time these issues are resolved, it will be too late for lessons to be learned.

So many who have lost loved ones or are still living with the consequences of Covid deserve to know the truth. They also deserve to be reassured that we understand where the Government’s successes were, where the failures were, and that lessons have been learned. I hope the Minister will be able to give some answers today to reassure the House that that is the Government’s ambition too, because that aim is being undermined by this legal action.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, what a dog’s breakfast this is when a Government who spend so much time complaining about other people using judicial reviews stand before us trying to justify their decision to use the same legal process to prevent an inquiry that they set up having access to communications sent by members of that very same Government on matters of significant public interest.

The Government’s case appears to be that full disclosure would be unfair because their communications are all over the place, mixing business and pleasure with God knows what in a soup of uncontrolled WhatsApping, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, has already flagged. Yet this is a problem entirely of their own making. While the pandemic was not something that anyone could have foreseen, it was entirely predictable that the way this Government have been working would lead to problems. If this were not happening with the Covid inquiry, we would have arrived here sooner or later with some other investigation into government decision-making where disclosure of Ministers’ messages was necessary.

Does the Minister accept that this situation could have been avoided if her Government had shown more discipline in managing government communications from the outset? Does she agree that it was not inevitable that we would end up in this mess—that this could have been avoided through having clear rules such as using different devices for home and work communications, as is common in many other sectors? Can she indicate whether all Ministers are now following improved protocols so that we will not repeatedly fall into this same situation, as there are surely other areas of government policy that will be challenged either in the courts or through future public inquiries?

I am sure that all of us find it hard to keep track of which communications channels we use for which purposes, and it can of course be convenient to mix them up, but the business of government is special and communications about decisions by government that affect millions of people have a particular importance. This importance means that Ministers of the Crown and those working for them should be held to a higher standard, and they have more resources available than most of us to help them meet those high standards.

The fact that this court case is happening is not—however much the Government protest—a way of protecting all Governments from overreach, as not all Governments would have allowed decisions to be made in the way that this one has done. Concerns about this Government acting as a chumocracy, mixing public business with the private interests of their friends and supporters, run much more widely than the supply of PPE during the pandemic.

The public interest is not now served by the Government throwing up legal barriers to those we have tasked with investigating, thoroughly and impartially, how decisions were made on matters of massive public interest. The Minister has a job to do and she has been sent here to defend her Government’s latest actions, but I hope that she will at least acknowledge that this is not a bolt from the blue but an inevitable consequence of how her colleagues have been working for far too long.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)]

I start by agreeing with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, that it is difficult to answer questions when we have not had the benefit of the Statement. It was a long Statement in the other place.

WhatsApp: Ministerial Communications

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Wednesday 8th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I will not be drawn on the individual case, but I will point to what the Government are doing and also refer the noble Lord, who is a friend, to the Covid inquiry. My understanding is that Mr Hancock has said that he will ensure that all appropriate material is given to the inquiry, and I understand that the Department of Health and Social Care is ensuring just that.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

I understand that staff in departments such as the DWP and HMRC already have guidance that tells them very clearly that they should not use their personal phones for business purposes. This creates a very clear separation between personal and public correspondence. Can the Minister confirm whether the advice she was given included clear strictures on using personal devices for public purposes and, if not, why not?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The answer is that it did.

Infected Blood Inquiry

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the Minister. This Statement is welcome but, as I sure she would acknowledge, information for victims and their families is long overdue. Earlier this year, the Government did not provide an Oral Statement to the House when they published Sir Robert’s report. Ministers were, of course, forced to publish the report after it was leaked, and sadly, that has been all too typical of the experience of victims and their families throughout this long and painful process. Most heartbreaking of all is that many of those infected have not lived to see the justice they deserved. The Terence Higgins Trust calculates that in the five years since the start of the inquiry in July 2017, more than 400 victims have sadly died. While we await the report conclusion and inquiry, another person dies every four days. The Minister knows that answers are needed, so today I have four questions for her.

First, will she commit to the publication of a timetable for the compensation framework? Will she work in partnership with the infected blood community to develop the compensation framework for those affected? When will she end the Government’s silence on the other 18 recommendations that have not been acted on so far? How will she make sure that everyone who wants to respond to the proposals has the opportunity to do so?

Sporadic updates, unfortunately without any substance, are not good enough. We would like to see regular progress updates to this House and, more importantly, victims and their families. The contaminated blood scandal has had life-changing impacts on tens of thousands of victims who put their faith in the promise of effective treatment. When the Government received a copy of the report by Sir Robert Francis, Ministers were clear that it would be published alongside a government response. The report was published in June but we still do not have the full government response. It would be helpful to understand why it did not come with the report.

I am aware that the Minister in another place said that the Government are awaiting the full report of the infected blood inquiry chaired by Sir Brian Langstaff before responding in full to that report and that of Sir Robert Francis. The Minister said that the issues were so complex that the Government could not commit to a timetable. However, given that the inquiry began over five years ago, surely they cannot credibly justify the length of time this is taking. Surely the Minister can understand the deep disappointment of victims and their families that this most recent government Statement contains nothing to suggest that their formal response will be forthcoming any time soon. Victims will not and should not be expected to accept empty gestures.

It seems to families that the plan changes with every announcement. In another place, the Minister did not provide any clarity on the timeline for payments and declined to commit to one. Given the length of time that has elapsed and the now broad understanding of what happened, affected families must be involved at every stage. The Government should have plans to work in partnership with the infected blood community to develop the compensation framework.

We acknowledge and warmly welcome the support for victims and their partners in the interim scheme, but we know that the contaminated blood scandal deeply affected other family members and loved ones, such as their parents and children. So far, their experiences have not been similarly acknowledged. It would be helpful to understand what the Government will do to ensure that these victims are also supported. There will need to be consultation on the proposed compensation framework, and the Government must make sure that everyone who wants to has the opportunity to respond to all the proposals.

I will repeat my four questions to the Minister, as I am aware that questions are often lost in these exchanges—there can be dozens of them and it can be difficult for Ministers, so I ask them again for absolute clarity. First, will she commit to a timetable for the publication of a compensation framework? Secondly, will she work in partnership with the infected blood community to develop the compensation framework for those affected? Thirdly, when will the Government respond to the other 18 recommendations? Fourthly, how will they make sure that everyone who wants to respond to the proposals can do so? I apologise for repeating those questions, but there are only four and I would like to leave the Chamber with some clarity about the answers.

This has been a deeply distressing and shaming episode. We know that what has happened cannot be undone. All that is possible now is to understand, recognise and compensate those harmed so terribly by this scandal. As we approach Christmas, the loss of those dearest to us is often felt more keenly than during the rest of the year. I am sorry that another Christmas will come and go without the certainty that so many families are owed. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, Sir Robert Francis’s study into a framework for paying compensation starts with powerful testimony from those who were given infected blood products and those around them whom this affected deeply. Members in another place shared moving stories of their constituents in responding to this Statement last week.

This all points to the absolute urgency of getting compensation to the people who we are morally obligated to help, as Ministers now have agreed. We need to keep coming back to the timetable for establishing the full scheme and press the Government to move as quickly as humanly possible. I certainly echo the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, that we need a timetable to give people certainty.

There has been considerable political turmoil this year, but it is good to know that the machinery of government kept working and has now been able to deliver the interim payments that Sir Brian Langstaff asked for in July. It would be helpful if the Minister could reiterate for the record what I understand the policy to be: that there are no circumstances under which any of those interim payments could be required to be paid back and that they could go up from £100,000 once the final scheme is in place, but they will never go down. That reassurance needs to be repeated for those applying to the scheme.

Could the Minister also ensure that recipients of compensation are properly protected as they claim for and receive these payments? We know that, sadly, there are some less moral people out there who will seek to take advantage of those entitled to compensation in any such scheme, either through excessive charges to support them through the claim process or by defrauding or seeking to defraud them once they have received the funds. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that we minimise the risks of financial exploitation of claimants during and after the claim process?

Sir Robert’s report included a recommendation for an arm’s-length body to be set up to manage the compensation scheme. This seems sensible as a way to build confidence from all parties concerned and shows lessons being learned from previous schemes such as the Windrush scheme, where there was a breakdown in confidence which damaged the scheme. Are the Government looking at how such a body could be set up? Are they doing that now under the committee that I understand is being led by Sue Gray in the Cabinet Office, to ensure that setting up such a body does not itself become a source of further delay if this is what the inquiry eventually recommends?

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)]

My Lords, I start by saying that this is an unimaginably awful matter causing heartbreak and pain to all those directly and indirectly affected. It is a deeply shaming episode, as the noble Baroness rightly said. It dates back many years to the 1970s and 1980s and is a tragedy that has affected all Governments. We have to resolve it and move forward. The noble Baroness did not mention the need to ease the stigma and to be more vocal about the awful experiences of those involved and their loved ones, especially a long time ago when HIV/AIDS was less well understood.

The noble Lord, Lord Allan, asked about the interim payments, which we have all welcomed. It was an amazing effort by the machine once those were recommended to make them all by the end of October. They can only go up; they cannot come down. I think that was the reassurance he was seeking.

The noble Baroness had a number of questions. I think the first was on whether we can commit to publishing a full timetable for compensation. Clearly, that is something we would like to do. As she will understand from the Statement, it was the Government’s intention to publish our response to the compensation framework, and timings and so on, alongside the study, but the sheer complexity and the interdependencies have meant we are not able to set a timetable or, to answer one of her other points, to respond on all of the other recommendations in Sir Francis’s extremely good and perceptive report on compensation until we have the report from Sir Brian. I understand that that is expected next summer—I cannot say anything more explicit—and clearly, we will need to respond. The plans we have put in place will ensure that we are ready to respond.

The group led by Sue Gray was referenced, and that is progressing work on many fronts. This is a priority for government, so she is bringing together Permanent Secretaries—obviously the prime group of the Treasury, HMRC, the Cabinet Office and DHSC is leading on that, but it also involves the DWP, DLUHC, the devolved nations and others, as necessary. Preparations are being made so that, once the complexities are resolved with Sir Brian’s report, we will be able to move quickly.

Clearly the Government want to work with the people affected. I should take the opportunity to say how amazing the APPG has been, and I thank Dame Diana and Sir Peter Bottomley, and I know that in this House the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and Lady Meacher, have been involved. Both Sir Brian and Sir Robert have also consulted, and as we get closer to paying out more compensation, there will be more work with the various groups—I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Allan, nodding. To pick up some of the wording of the report by Sir Robert, the schemes have to be collaborative, sympathetic and as free of stress as possible for these people who have had unending disappointments. But they also have to be simple and easy to access, and consistent with our fight against fraud and scammers. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Allan, made that point; again, it is high on our agenda.

We are working across government to ensure that we can deliver on the recommendations of the report. As I have already explained, it is a high-level, cross-government working group; it meets monthly and it is gearing up, thinking about the IT systems and how we ensure that we contact people who might want to seek compensation once we know the precise framework, and make sure that everyone can respond. Publicity is very important with these public issues, and noble Lords across the House can help with that, so that people know what is happening.

The final point I do not think I have covered is whether there should be an ALB, which is one of the recommendations in Sir Robert’s report. We are of course giving that careful consideration. It is clear how important it is that any vehicle for delivery of a compensation scheme carries the trust of the victims—I cannot make that point strongly enough—but it also has to achieve the objective of delivering compensation in a speedy and efficient manner. There are also issues regarding legislation and so on, which the Gray group is looking at.

To conclude, we are doing everything that we can within the constraints that I have described, and which the Paymaster-General, who spoke in the House last week, was very honest about. We will make progress statements to the House so that we do not repeat the difficulties of the past. We are absolutely determined as a Government to give this priority and get it sorted. This has been a serious failure and we have to compensate those who have had such a ghastly time.