Victims and Prisoners Bill

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 30th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for meeting many of us in many different meetings between Committee and Report; I suspect there may be some more meetings to come. I have a number of amendments. For the record, my amendments to the government amendments are Amendments 119D, 119HA, 119K, 119M, 119P, 119T, 119U, 119V, 119X, 119Y, 121B, 121C and 121D. I also have Amendments 119YB, 119YC, 163 and 166.

Following discussions with various members of the infected blood community, I want to make a brief point about the approach in amendments laid by the Government. In Committee, the Minister said:

“The Government’s intention, therefore, is to bring forward an amendment on Report which will correct these two deficiencies”—


that he had outlined—

“and add further standard provisions to ensure a more complete legal framework when setting up an ALB”.

He went to explain that he was going to engage with us, and we are very grateful for that. He went on:

“That drafting is not yet complete. One of the main reasons for this—which I personally felt strongly about—was that we should use this Committee stage as an opportunity for a general debate on the infected blood scandal and, in advance of Report, for the Government to be made aware of the views expressed … around the Chamber”.—[Official Report, 26/2/24; col. 833.]


I thank the noble Earl for that comment, and I think he has certainly got our views.

However, instead of one amendment covering two deficiencies and a more complete legal framework, the Government laid nearly 40 amendments within the last 10 days without any equivalent to an Explanatory Memorandum or a long letter to explain their thinking. I accept that there was an explanatory statement under most of the amendments, but I have been operating two sets of the amendment booklet just to try to work out what on earth has been happening here.

The real problem is that, while we express general views in Committee, we are now being asked to vote—or not—on really fine detail, which I think many Members have been struggling with, just to get amendments laid. That is why there are 67 amendments in this one group this afternoon.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Campbell and Lady Meacher, set out why the infected blood community is concerned that there is not enough detail to give them confidence, despite the Government moving forward a bit. I just wonder if the Minister is open to a meeting, because I think we may be able to move further forward, particularly on the issue of interim payments that would satisfy both noble Lords and the wider community.

The noble Earl explained why the Government do not support Sir Brian’s approach to interim payments. He went into a lot more detail in a private meeting, for which I am grateful, but this week—or was it last week?—the Paymaster-General told the Commons that interim payments would be made through the existing schemes to the estates of those eligible for interim payment, where the deceased was registered with a current support scheme or one of its predecessors. While those in the infected blood community are content with this, they are still very concerned about the lack of timescale on interim payments where the deceased meets the criteria and the need for an assurance of one month, as we originally proposed. If it cannot be one month, we should have some idea of the timing.

I am very grateful to the noble Earl for explaining the two-tier system, where those who have not yet had interim payments but are known in the system are different from those who are not yet known. I think the community understands that as well. The victims also need reassurance where the government amendments refer to “may” rather than “must”. I know that there are some reasons for that, but, in the meetings with the community, the Paymaster-General may have to explain some of those reasons. Again, this is about rebuilding the confidence that he spoke so movingly about at the start.

The detail of the government amendments has been met with bemusement and anger by many of the community. It is partly about the timescales. I think the House is grateful that the Government are accepting Amendment 119CA from the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, but there is still no framework and no idea about tariffs. Worse, the threats to the victims and their families of this scheme remain. One widow told me that she was concerned that widows and children will end up worse off under the scheme than currently. So where is an impact assessment, as current payments may be stopped and there is no outline about what the tariff is? Somebody could end up with a proposal that is considerably less but has many years still to live, so how will they be protected from this happening?

Will recipients be asked to pay back support—“benefits” to you and me—that families relied on after their loved ones became infected and needed to be nursed and cared for by family members? Jobs and houses were lost and, frankly, we know that benefits have not been generous either. That is in the nature of benefits, but many people have been living this way for 30 or 40 years—now approaching 50 years for some. It would be egregious if those families were to receive compensation that immediately went to pay back decades of benefits. Can the Minister confirm that this will not happen? This is part of my Amendment 119HA, as an outline for framework tariffs and a clear statement that families will not have to pay back benefits. By the way, my amendments follow recommendations 6 and 8 in the interim report from Sir Brian, which was published nearly a year ago now.

I also have other amendments trying to give clarity for the position of the IB victims and their families. For example, there has been a lot of discussion with the Horizon postmaster victims about legal support. Will there be legal support for these families? My Amendment 119V says that they should have the option of that legal support, including people who have been supporting them at the inquiry and other places. That is not retrospective payment. It would be continuing support in the future, so that they can negotiate with the scheme.

My Amendment 121B refers to the appointment of a High Court judge as chair. I am grateful for the points that the noble Earl has made, but there is still no timescale and that remains a key issue. Could he explain to the House exactly why, and perhaps unpack a little more about whether the chair should be a judge or even a High Court judge, which is very much what the infected blood community wants?

Finally, I have laid Amendment 119YC, which uses the principle helpfully offered by the Government for their own amendment for the infected blood compensation body, to probe whether now is the time for a truly independent compensation authority overall. This body would act as the manager of all compensation schemes for victims of failures of public bodies. We do not have time this evening to discuss this in any detail, but it is appalling that we have the infected blood scandal scheme —still not sorted after over 40 years—the postmaster Horizon scheme, the Windrush scheme, the Grenfell disaster, the sodium valproate scandal, the vaginal mesh scandal and many others. The one thing common to all of these is that no Government, of any colour, have acted fairly or with reasonable speed to resolve the remedies for all these victims. Perhaps now is the time to begin that debate—not tonight, but at this time.

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

I join other noble Lords and Baronesses in paying tribute to my noble friend, who has been extremely generous with his time in meetings. I am quite certain that he personally has been pushing in the direction that has led to really major progress. I declare an interest as a former Secretary of State and therefore a witness to the Langstaff inquiry.

The three months is excellent; the shadow organisation set up before the final report is good; the shadow CEO is excellent. I am interested in Amendment 119HA, from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. Like her, I would like the reassurance sought in her proposed new subsection (2):

“In assessing compensation under the scheme, no account should be taken of any past support payments”.


The structures of the tariff-based compensation and so forth seem right and sensible. If we can have reassurance on that also, it would be very helpful.

The major item in the noble Baroness’s amendment is one that sets off tremendous alarm bells in the former Chief Secretary lobe—or half—of my brain. The idea of letting the chair set the tariffs, even with these structures around them, would have been very alarming to me, as a former Chief Secretary, and would be alarming to any future person who has to be accountable for public expenditure.

None the less, I still hesitate on it, because every noble Lord has spoken about the requirement to rebuild trust, and my noble friend himself began his speech with that. If it were possible to provide criteria for the payments such that the chair was enabled to be independent within those criteria, that would rebuild trust in a formidable way. I would be very interested to hear what my noble friend has to say on that.

Rebuilding trust is the primary task, as it has been among the terrible casualties of this disaster—trust in the state, trust in the NHS and doctors, trust in everybody. Trust in Ministers, of course, has been severely damaged and we may have to take exceptional steps in this really unparalleled scale of disaster to rebuild that trust. Precedent is always a terrible weapon to deploy against anything, but one hopes that there would be a few precedents for disasters on this scale in the future. I would like to probe my noble friend a little further on that, but I end by thanking him again. I was privileged to work with him as a colleague in the past, and it is no surprise to those of us who have worked with him that he has been not only efficient but empathetic and careful, in the best sense of the word, in his dealings certainly with me and, I suspect, with other Members of this House as well.

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, as some of your Lordships will know, I declare an interest as my nephew died aged 35. He was a haemophiliac, a twin and my sister’s son. He left a 10 month-old baby daughter. I too thank the noble Earl for being so sincere about this. He is one of the first people I have heard on the government side who actually gets it and understands the agony that the community has been through over the last 40 years—so I thank him for that.

I will speak briefly to a couple of amendments. With Amendment 119PA, we are concerned that infected and affected people who may want to appeal against a decision on compensation will not be able to go to a separate body to appeal, as Sir Brian Langstaff recommended in his report. If Sir Brian’s recommendations are ignored, people will have to seek to reverse a decision through the First-tier Tribunal, as is the case at the moment. They are concerned about that because the First-tier Tribunal is not specialised in infected blood and has a whole host of other things to deal with, such as PIP and housing appeals. The process will be very difficult.

Brexit: Triggering Article 50

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Wednesday 29th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I thank the noble Lord and once again pay tribute to the work of the Select Committees of this House, which have done an invaluable job already in investigating a number of very important issues and providing some very useful information. As the noble Lord will know, tomorrow we will produce the White Paper on the great repeal Bill, which will be the beginning of the discussion on the scrutiny of legislation going forward. I reiterate that key changes to policy will be brought forward in primary legislation, so this House will have the opportunity to be involved, but I know that my noble friend Lord Bridges and the Chief Whip have already been in touch with a number of committee chairs and will continue to have that discussion, as we will through the usual channels. I hope this House will accept that we have tried to be open; I know it has not always satisfied noble Lords, but we will do our best.

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, may I join the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, in supporting the tone of the Prime Minister’s Statement? I draw my noble friend’s attention to the admirable article by my noble friend Lord Finkelstein in the Times today, which describes a successful negotiation as one in which both sides regard themselves as the winners. Does my noble friend agree that, in order to achieve such a negotiation, sometimes it will be necessary to ignore the advice of those who think that any element of disagreement means the end of the world, and of those who believe that any element of compromise or agreement will represent betrayal?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

My noble friend is right: these are going to be extremely complex negotiations, but we will approach them with the full intention of securing a deal that delivers the best possible outcome for the UK. Of course, as we enter negotiations, we will hear people saying—we have heard it already—“That is not workable; it is not achievable”. But we are confident that we can secure a good deal, and we will go in optimistically. As noble Lords have previously said, the European Council has stressed that it wishes to work constructively for us, so I think we are starting off on the right foot.

Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill]

My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Forsyth. I think that the House has already paid tribute to his own role in support of Lady Thatcher in later years; it is one that should indeed be on the record.

I was her last appointment to the Cabinet. In the run-up to the first Gulf War, I was going across two or three times every day as Minister of State at the Foreign Office until she said, “Come in, William, I want a word with you. You are to be Secretary of State for Health”. This was unexpected news to me, as it was to the rest of the country and certainly to the health service. She looked at me and said, “I think you need a large whisky. I will have one too. Now, Kenneth has stirred them all up”—that was my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke—“and I want you to quieten them all down”.

She was extremely pragmatic, in the best sense, about the health service. She made it perfectly clear to me that if I thought that the reforms which had just been launched were not well based, it was up to me to stop them. As a matter of fact, I came to believe that they were the right thing to do and tried to follow them through. However, that showed that although she was often described as an ideologue—this is a point that has been made today—she was not. She did not fall into the mistake of thinking that there were grand theories to explain everything. She stuck to common, decent morality and then looked at the facts.

I want to make two small points in relation to that. It has been said already by the noble Lord, Lord May, above all, and by others that her science training was crucial to her. I think that it was; she was the first and only woman to be Prime Minister and the first and only scientist to be Prime Minister. I hope that there will be more of both. As the noble Lord, Lord May, said, she played an extremely important part in a number of crucial scientific issues, of which perhaps the most famous was the work to take action to stop the production of CFCs—chlorofluorocarbons—which were damaging the ozone layer. It did no harm, of course, that some of the crucial science which led to the proof of the damage to the ozone layer had been done by British scientists, by the British Antarctic Survey, so it was respectable science. She acted.

It was not always so successful. As a Minister in the Department of the Environment, I tried to persuade her to impose flue gas desulphurisation on the power stations to stop acid rain. She did not want to do it, partly because she did not want to put the price of coal up and damage the coal industry even more, although this may sound paradoxical to some. I plotted with Horst Teltschik, who ran Chancellor Kohl’s office, and said to him ahead of a bilateral summit in Bonn, “Will you get your man to really put some pressure on over this, because I think she might move”. She obviously saw me coming a long way in advance. We arrived in Bonn in helicopters and got out. There was a local inversion—a local hot day—and therefore smog. “Now Helmut”, she said to the cowering Chancellor—he was always a little nervous of her, as were others—“I will tell you what you have here. You have got an inversion and a smog. If you had proper clean air laws, like we do in England, that would have put paid to all that. I will explain the chemistry to you if you like”. He did not want to know the chemistry and no more was heard over that weekend of my plot. She was not an ideologue, she was somebody who looked at the evidence.

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said of course that we must not forget the towering contribution of Gorbachev to the reformation of Europe. But who was it who first spotted that Gorbachev was the person with whom we were going to be able to “do business”? As a footnote here, we should pay tribute to a brave man, Oleg Gordievsky, who briefed her that Gorbachev was going to be a man you could do business with, but then she sold Gorbachev to Reagan, and the rest was history.

As another example, where she is often misinterpreted, she understood that FW de Klerk was something different and that all the clamour about sanctions was irrelevant. She preserved Britain’s position, so that when things began to move in South Africa, well briefed by a formidable ambassador in the noble Lord, Lord Renwick, we had leverage and she could say to de Klerk, “We will help you do this”. That is what Mr Mandela himself recognised. He paid tribute to her role in the final transition days from apartheid in South Africa. It is a crude and completely ignorant caricature to say that she was on the wrong side in South Africa—when it came to it, she played a crucial part.

The House deserves one apology from someone like me, who is a member of the University of Oxford, which she loved. I was present once when she was at a dinner at Somerville, my mother’s college, and spoke so movingly about what Somerville had meant to her, a grammar school girl coming into the world, and how passionately she supported the equality of opportunity that those colleges provided. It was a disgraceful example of the perennial ineptitude of the collectivity of the University of Oxford, which has nearly always managed to get these issues wrong—it got it wrong over Asquith and it got it wrong over her. It remains a disgrace and I only wish that there were some way of putting that right posthumously, but there is not.

In 1973, my then boss, Lord Rothschild, made a speech—or at least he gave a lecture which was then leaked—saying that in the year 2000 Britain would be half as rich per capita as France, which caused displeasure to the then Government of Mr Heath. It did not happen and instead we just overtook France. What had happened in between? Lady Thatcher had happened.