Contaminated Blood

Lord Elystan-Morgan Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness. This is a UK inquiry. The problem affected the whole of the UK. There are provisions under the Inquiries Act for consultation to take place with the devolved Parliaments and Assemblies, but it is a UK inquiry. There is a specific issue about the arrangements made for helping those who suffered. It is a devolved responsibility. Those particular responsibilities may differ in Scotland from the rest of the UK.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)]

My Lords, while I welcome the Government’s initiative in this matter, may I ask about an inquiry that was conducted about 10 years ago by the late Lord Archer, a former law officer? It was privately commissioned, but published thereafter. I think that the recommendations were accepted by the Government of that day. Can the Minister tell us something more about that, which was apparently a searching and revealing study into this matter?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord asks a question that is right at the extremity of my familiarity with the subject, but I looked it up and the noble Lord is quite right. There was an independent inquiry in the early 2000s by the former Solicitor-General for England and Wales, Lord Archer. I understand that it held no legal or official status at all. It was unable to subpoena witnesses or demand the disclosure of documents, but it looked at some of the issues and discovered that some important documents had been destroyed. There were issues of missing evidence. After he reported, Lord Jenkin, who was also a former Secretary of State, voiced his difficulties about obtaining documents for the inquiry. That inquiry is available and will be available to the statutory inquiry. I hope that it will be able to build on some of the work that Lord Archer undertook.