Infected Blood Inquiry

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, it is difficult to follow those personal recollections, but they bring home to us the suffering that so many people have experienced. I should, in the spirit of openness, say that I chaired the inquiry’s expert advisory group on public health and public administration and, in that capacity, I gave evidence to the inquiry. And with that experience, although it has been said already, I want to add my tribute to the way in which Sir Brian Langstaff chaired this inquiry. I have chaired a much smaller public inquiry and I know how difficult that was. I think he has achieved almost the impossible: a report that is forthright, clear, succinct and, as the Minister said, unflinchingly honest. But the thing that impressed me most of all was the relationship that he managed to build with the victims, their families and supporters, which was really quite remarkable.

Sadly, the performance of the inquiry contrasts sharply with the failings that it has exposed. While I am desperate to see the victims finally receive justice and compensation, today I want to focus on the need for us to follow up the inquiry by responding to the failings themselves. These represent, for me, a breakdown in public service standards which has been evident in too many cases in the recent past: in those regarding the Post Office, Grenfell, Windrush and Hillsborough. I do not think that these can any longer be dismissed as isolated incidents. There is a pattern, and the pattern besmirches the public service that we have known and that many of us have worked in for the whole of our lives.

The tragedy of infected blood claimed 3,000 lives. I sometimes feel that the world finds that horror so difficult to comprehend that we are not giving enough attention to how it happened. As Sir Brian makes clear, this could have been avoided, and that is the greatest tragedy of all. It could have been avoided if the state had behaved in the way in which the various codes of behaviour suggested that it should. Instead, it falsely reassured the public and patients—painful though that is to relate, it is important to. It failed to tell people of the risk of treatment. It deliberately destroyed documents. It failed to tell people that they were infected. It offered no meaningful apology or redress. It repeatedly used inaccurate, misleading and defensive lines to take. Finally, it responded to calls for a public inquiry by producing flawed, incomplete and unfair internal reports.

The point is that these were not unfortunate mistakes. In too many cases they were deliberate attempts to mislead and obfuscate, and to protect the institutions of the state to the detriment of individual citizens. As Sir Brian says:

“It will be astonishing to anyone who reads this Report that these events could have happened in the UK”.


I add that it is particularly astonishing because we have long proclaimed, so proudly in the Nolan principles, the Civil Service Code and the Ministerial Code, our commitment to openness and integrity, and to honesty and fairness—all of which was so obviously absent in the many years during which the infected blood tragedy unfolded. The only conclusion I can draw is that the arrangements that we have in place to set and enforce the standards that we expect from public officials are inadequate. They are insufficient and need to be revisited. The only question for me is: what exactly are we going to do about it?

The inquiry report itself raises the possibility of a new duty of candour, which I have long supported. Rather more importantly, the Prime Minister, it seems, supports that. He recently announced, as the Minister said, that a Bill will be introduced in April next year to place that duty on the statute book. That Bill has become known as the Hillsborough law, but I see it being just as important as part of the response to the Infected Blood Inquiry. It is a mistake to link it to just one of the many recent tragedies.

The promised Bill will represent a step forward, but there are many questions that we need to ask, and I would like to pose some of them today. I know the Minister may not be able to answer them, so I hope she will pass them on to her Cabinet Office colleagues. The first question is: why is it taking so long to publish the draft of a Bill that is central to the way in which the state relates to its citizens and, therefore, central to the way in which this new Administration intend to govern? I know how difficult it is to produce and draft a Bill and White Papers, and I am surprised that it will have taken a year, since the publication of the inquiry report, to reach publication of a Bill.

Secondly, will the Bill be broad enough in scope to give statutory force to the behaviours currently set out in the Nolan principles and the various codes, or will the new duty apply only to occasions when officials give evidence to inquiries, in court cases or at judicial review requests? If that is what it is about, it will fail to introduce accountability for the failings that do not become the subject of such formal scrutiny but can still bring untold suffering to ordinary citizens.

Will the Bill be the subject of extensive pre-legislative scrutiny involving relevant campaign groups and ordinary members of the public? As I have said, this is about redefining the relationship between the state and individual citizens. We need to find a way to ensure that individual citizens have a chance to be involved.

Will the new Bill make it clear that the ultimate responsibility of any public official is not to the institution for which they work or even to Ministers? It is to members of the public. Until these and other questions are answered, we cannot be sure that the failings that Sir Brian identified will be effectively addressed. I am afraid that people are quite sceptical, given the experience of which we have heard that many have suffered down the years.

What we know today, as the inquiry report tells us, is that all is not well with the way in which the state and our public officials behave. It tells us that we have sometimes been too complacent about our standards in government in the UK. It reminds us that decent, ordinary, but ultimately powerless people can have their lives and the lives of their loved ones devastated by government and its agencies. If anything positive is to come out of this disaster, it should be this redefinition of the relationship between the state and individual citizens. The quicker we get to the crux of that, the better.