Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme: Covid-19

Debate between Alicia Kearns and Jeremy Wright

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

Yes, I agree entirely with my hon. Friend, who puts it very well. It is important not just that we have the right scheme—I do not believe yet that we do—but that, as he says, when that scheme is in place, it pays out quickly. It is clear that the scheme in place at the moment is not doing that, and it simply is not acceptable or feasible for families in severe financial distress to have to wait the length of time that they are being asked to wait. And the example that he gives is a good one.

That example is also important in another respect, because there is something else that the Government need to do. In relation to those cases where vaccine injury is fatal, as was the case with my hon. Friend’s constituent, the Government need to protect entitlement to benefits, as they have done with other similar schemes but which they are currently not doing in relation to payouts under the VDPS. Whether that is universal credit or some other benefit, that post-death entitlement needs to be protected in a way not currently allowed by the law.

The second problem with the VDPS is that it requires a 60% level of disablement. The first thing to say about that is that the percentage of disablement can be hard to quantify in these cases, as Jamie Scott’s consultant made clear in her opinion. However, the second thing to say about it is that 60% is a very high bar. There can be significant injury or disablement that does not meet that threshold but is still life-changing. The VDPS is all or nothing: it pays out the full amount or nothing at all. In other words, someone adjudged to be 59% disabled as a direct result of vaccination would receive no compensation at all under the scheme. That cannot be right.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

Before my right hon. and learned Friend gets to the payment system, I want to raise the issue of support. My constituent Charlotte was a 39-year-old healthy mother of three children. I am furious and appalled after having had to approach three Government Ministers, two NHS trusts and the local GP to ask if someone can help her with the myriad health conditions she has contracted as a result of doing the right and getting her vaccination. She has not got long covid; the long covid units and clinics do not want to talk to her. No one wants to support her. Currently, she is going to Germany for treatment. Her life has been destroyed, she cannot be a mother and yet not one Minister or anyone else seems to want to make sure that this very small cohort of people have a meaningful pathway to care and support.

Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that we need to get a grip regarding this very small number of people and that Ministers need to reach out individually to every single family in this situation, make sure that they know what support they can receive, ensure that there is a care pathway, and help MPs to help their constituents?

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

Yes. Again, I agree with my hon. Friend, who puts her point very powerfully. It seems to me that there is an opportunity for the Government to do better, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister and her colleagues will take up that opportunity.

We are talking about people in very great need who have done the right thing. There is no fault whatsoever on their part, and the Government are best served by helping them, not just for individual reasons but collectively because of the impact that will have on Government policy. I will come back to that point. As my hon. Friend says, the level of support currently on offer is not adequate.

The third problem with the VDPS is that payouts under it are limited to £120,000. That may sound like a lot of money, but it is certainly not enough to compensate for more serious injury and loss of earnings and amenity over lifetimes, especially for people in the 40s, like Jamie Scott, who are disproportionately highly represented among the figures of those who have suffered vaccine-related injury. I appreciate that the Minister will say that the VDPS is not designed to be full compensation but an additional payment that does not prejudice a right to pursue damages through the courts. I want to explore that argument for a moment.

The fact that VDPS payments cannot and will not constitute full compensation in many of these cases makes legal action almost inevitable. When those cases are brought, they are likely to be brought against the Government, because of the perfectly sensible indemnities given by the Government to those firms that have produced the vaccines. The cases brought will either be won by those injured or lost. If they are won, the Government will be paying full compensation for injury, with additional and avoidable legal costs added. If they are lost, people who have suffered for doing the right thing, the thing that the Government asked them to do, will not be compensated for hardship they have suffered through no fault of their own.

Win or lose, the Government should not want those cases litigated. It will seem either that compensation is being dragged out of the Government or that it is being denied in what the public are likely to think are highly deserving cases. Worse still, those cases will put incidents of vaccine injury in the spotlight. We are rightly proud of the widespread take-up in what has been a successful and ongoing vaccination programme, but that take-up relies on public confidence in the covid-19 vaccine programme—confidence that is itself based on the safety of the vaccine. It is, let us be clear, overwhelmingly safe, but it is not universally safe. No vaccine is. The cases we are discussing today demonstrate that.

The Government need people to know, surely, that if they are in the tiny minority of those injured by the vaccine that they are being urged to take, they will be looked after. If people cannot be confident of that and see that as they witness those cases being litigated, it is likely to damage uptake of the vaccine. Of course, we must recognise that the Government may need to pursue mass vaccination again in the future. It seems to me that the Government should properly compensate those injured by covid-19 vaccines for reasons of policy as well as those of morality.

The question that follows is: can it be done better? You would, of course, expect me to say, Sir Edward, that yes, it can. These are relatively few cases in number, which means that the financial liability for Government is relatively delimited. There are domestic precedents we can follow—for example, the Thalidomide Trust. There are international examples that we can look to as well. The comparable scheme in Canada is also a no-fault scheme that compensates for

“severe, life-threatening or life-altering injury that may require… hospitalization or a prolongation of existing hospitalization, and results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or where the outcome is a congenital malformation or death.”

Significantly, there is no percentage disablement requirement and, crucially, no upper limit to the level of compensation that may be awarded.

In Australia, the scheme covers

“a clinical condition or administration related injury…most likely as a result of receiving the COVID-19 Vaccine”,

involving hospital treatment and resulting in at least $1,000-worth of losses. Again, it is a no-fault scheme but it has no percentage disablement requirement and no upper limit to the compensation amount.

Perhaps most strikingly, the no-fault compensation scheme attached to the COVAX programme, whereby countries including the United Kingdom make vaccines available to developing countries, can award up to 12 times the GDP per capita of the claimant’s country. In the UK, that would mean an upper limit roughly three times that of the VDPS. That means that the UK Government are funding better vaccine injury compensation for people in other countries than they are for people in our own. That surely is not a defensible position.

The Government must do better, and soon. They must either reform the VDPS in order to make it more similar to the best international comparators, or find a way to settle the inevitable legal actions in these cases swiftly and fairly. They must surely do so in their own interests, because in the end, the cost to Government of failing to compensate those who have acted on Government policy will be higher than the cost of compensating them.

It is because I support vaccination that I want confidence in vaccination to be maintained. Mostly, the Government should act because the people we are talking about did the right thing at the behest of their Government. Their Government now need to do the right thing by them.

Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Disabled Persons) Bill

Debate between Alicia Kearns and Jeremy Wright

3rd reading
Friday 18th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who made that point with great force and clarity during the Bill’s previous proceedings, for which I am grateful. He is absolutely right: it is necessary to recognise that a huge amount of good work is already being done by taxi and private hire vehicle drivers. No part of this Bill’s provisions is designed to suggest otherwise but, as he will recognise, a minority of drivers and operators do not yet comply with the expectations that we would all have as legislators and, frankly, that the good taxi and private hire vehicle drivers he talks about would also expect as a basic provision for their disabled passengers and clients. It is no reflection on those who do a good job, particularly those who moved people around over the pandemic when they would otherwise have been unable to be moved. I hope my hon. Friend will be reassured that we are seeking to strike that important balance, and I will come on to talk about that.

Before I do, I will finish my earlier point about sections 165A and 167A, which provide rights and protections to ensure that disabled people are not, by default, prevented from benefiting from the rights and protections provided in sections 164A and 165. To reiterate an earlier point, the fundamental intention of this Bill is to ensure that the Equality Act 2010 works more comprehensively for the millions of disabled people in this country.

To come back to my hon. Friend’s point, the Bill must also work for taxi and private hire vehicle drivers, many of whom already do what this Bill will require of them. The Bill simply would not work if it did not consider the range of people and situations that it could have an impact on, from both a passenger and a provider perspective. I believe that the duties, offences, defences, and exemptions in this Bill effectively balance the rights and protections for disabled people with the reasonable duties on drivers, operators, and local licencing authorities.

For a driver to assist a disabled person to identify or find their vehicle, the driver must be made aware before the start of the passenger’s journey that the passenger requires assistance to identify or find that vehicle. In order to carry a passenger in safety and reasonable comfort, the driver must reasonably have known that the passenger was disabled. For a driver to carry a disabled person’s wheelchair or mobility aid, it must be possible and reasonable for the wheelchair or mobility aid to be carried in the vehicle. The House can be satisfied that where a driver has a genuine reason why they could not fulfil the duties specified in this Bill, the defences provided would be adequate to avoid their being penalised unfairly.

This Bill would also amend driver exemptions from duties under the Equality Act. Currently, drivers can apply for an exemption on medical grounds or grounds related to their physical condition, which exempt them from all the duties in section 165. This Bill would ensure drivers are exempt from the appropriate sections by expanding the exemptions to cover some of the duties that would also be applied in proposed new section 164A.

It would also amend the driver exemptions so that they apply only to the mobility assistance duties in proposed new sections 164A and 165, thereby directly closing a loophole that enables a driver issued with an exemption because they cannot provide mobility assistance, to accept the carriage of a wheelchair user none the less, but to then, in theory at least, charge them more than they would other passengers. That cannot be right or the purpose of the exemption.

It is, as I said, a daunting task to create legislation that impacts millions of people, but the provisions in this Bill intend to do just that, ensuring disabled people have rights and protections when accessing taxis or private hire vehicles that work practically and across a multitude of scenarios. The Bill has been developed with disabled people’s step-by-step use of taxis and private hire vehicles at its core, from the booking stage, to finding the vehicle, to accessing and travelling in that vehicle.

[Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Melton) (Con)]

My right hon. and learned Friend has clearly worked incredibly carefully with disabled groups throughout the development of the Bill. The issue comes into my inbox and I hear from constituents facing these types of problem. Was it a personal issue in his own constituency that first raised his awareness of the issue?

[Jeremy Wright]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and she is right. I have spoken to a number of different disability campaign groups, advocacy groups and charities, and I am pleased to say they are all supportive of the Bill’s intention. As she represents a rural constituency, she will recognise, along with those others of us who represent rural areas, that taxis and private hire vehicles may be the only way for people with disabilities to get around. They are an important lifeline, so the provisions of the Bill will have effect particularly in rural areas, such as the ones that she and I represent.

I have come across, as she will have done, constituents who rely on that vital lifeline, not just during the covid pandemic but all the time. They will want to know that they have these rights, that drivers are aware that they have these rights and that they can be carried without additional charge and with the basic consideration that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes) mentioned earlier, good drivers already provide, but that all drivers should.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alicia Kearns]

It is absolutely not acceptable. The fact is that this Bill is being introduced because we have disabled people in our country being charged extra for the liberty, for the joy, for the privilege of being carried, and that is absolutely shameful.

We are very fortunate in Rutland and Melton, because we have two specific companies that are expert at providing support for the disabled. I pay tribute to Claire’s Taxis and Elaine’s Taxis, both in Melton, that do a great deal to support our disabled community. They are truly wonderful. This matter is important, as it affects so many people, not least in rural areas, because of the absence of bus services. In both Rutland and in Melton, Centrebus has put up the costs for its buses, so we will now lose the only bus service—the No.19 bus—between Melton and Nottingham. That bus is so important because it carries people between two major centres of work, it carries people for healthcare needs and it ensures that anyone who supports Nottingham Forest or Notts County football clubs and wants to get to Trent Bridge is able to get there—something everyone should have the right to do, including our disabled friends and family.

It is really important that this Bill will help those who are now suffering from an absence of bus services, although I make clear that I will be fighting for the No. 19 bus service and fighting for the buses within Rutland, and Centrebus will be hearing from me. I put this on the record, and I hope their lobbyists and public relations team are listening: Centrebus, I will be in touch, because it is unacceptable that you are stripping 460 square miles of decent bus services.

The Bill is also important to me for a reason that many of us in the Chamber will have experienced. I, too, have a loved one who has recently become reliant on the use of a wheelchair. She means everything to me, and she is currently suffering from cancer that has riddled the entirety of her body, particularly her bones, meaning that she is unable to stand or to do much travel.

This Monday, I hope for the first time in two and a half years to take my loved one somewhere that is not the hospital. I hope to take her to the British Museum to see the Stonehenge exhibition, but I have been ringing around trying to get a taxi to take her there. It is not far—it is only about a half-hour journey—yet every taxi firm I ring says, “Oh, sorry, we don’t have much disabled provision,” or, “We can’t promise you there’s going to be a disabled-friendly vehicle.” I say, “Do we need to bring a foldable wheelchair? Do we need to use an electric wheelchair? What do I need to do to make this happen?” I want to get her out of the house and to the British Museum for the first time since she had this appalling diagnosis, given the effects it will have on her in the long term.

Not a single taxi company that I have rung so far, in London of all places—it is not rural Rutland and Melton—has been unable to promise me that they will help me to get my loved one just a half-hour’s journey. This Bill will make a difference for all of us caring for loved ones who unfortunately have life-limiting or other conditions.

[Jeremy Wright]

I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s support. She will know that this Bill will come into effect two months after it is passed by this House and the other place and receives Royal Assent. Does she agree that it is not necessary for any taxi driver or private hire vehicle driver to wait for this legislation to be passed to offer the kind of service she describes? They can do that now, and many already do. I hope that this Bill will change the atmosphere, so that more and more drivers are prepared to offer the kind of services she describes.

[Alicia Kearns]

Absolutely. That is why the Bill is so important. As Conservatives, we do not want to have to pass legislation to require service providers to provide services to all people. People should not have to sit there and think, “When will Jeremy Wright come and save us all and ensure we can get the access we deserve?”

My right hon. and learned Friend is right; I am sure we will all be speaking in support of this important legislation, and the message should go out from this place today: step forward now. You have a choice, and you can ensure that anyone who is disabled, or partially sighted, or has any other needs is able to get to where they need to. It is welcome news that in two months’ time that will be a requirement, and perhaps I will not be struggling so much to provide basic access and equality of rights to those whom I love so greatly.

During the pandemic, many of our taxi drivers did great things, and I recognise that they have probably become more disabled-friendly as a result of that work. I am grateful for that. It is also important that my right hon. and learned Friend has sensibly included a clause that if a driver can argue that they could not have reasonably known a passenger was disabled, it will not be held against them, because we do not want to see that held against good, hard-working taxi drivers if they did not mean to do it.

Ultimately, however, the point stands that this is an important Bill for rural areas, to give equality of access to all disabled people and those of us who care so much about ensuring that companies step up and do what is right and do their duty. I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for all his work on this Bill.

It is sad that it has taken so long to get here and sad that it has required legislation, but it is absolutely the right thing to do. For my loved ones, I thank my right hon. and learned Friend. Let us hope we can look at what more we can do to ensure that, as I mentioned earlier, no mother or father is ever left in the rain with their children with a taxi driver driving away from them.