Hepatitis C (Haemophiliacs)

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Dobbin, for calling me to speak. It is a pleasure to be here in Westminster Hall under your chairmanship.

I, too, thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) for securing this debate and for his speech. I welcome the Minister, the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), to her post. This is the second Westminster Hall debate in two weeks that I have taken part in and she has responded to, so she has a very full in-tray. Nevertheless, I urge her to study her brief on this issue and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) said, to meet the victims of the contaminated blood scandal and their MPs.

Most importantly, the Minister should come up with a proposal for resolving the remaining injustices on this issue. I am sure that she will; she has a reputation for being thoughtful and open-minded on such subjects, but she will have heard from right hon. and hon. Members today that this problem becomes more pressing with every year that passes.

I am afraid that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North said, the cause was somewhat set back by the meeting that the previous Minister, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), had with the all-party group on haemophilia and contaminated blood earlier this year. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the worst meeting I can remember in eight years of going to such meetings. The previous Minister was completely unprepared in her brief; she shared the all-party group’s concerns but had no solutions whatever to address them. That meeting was attended by 20 MPs and peers, with 20 others giving their apologies. The number of Members who take part in the frequent debates on this issue shows the level of concern among all parties about it.

This is a great injustice, which successive Governments have failed to address; in so far as they have attempted to address it, they have done so in a miserly and bureaucratic way. An inquiry has been refused, and responsibility has been refused, by Government, and those things are to be deplored.

In the very few minutes that I have to speak, I wish to introduce one additional topic. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East has rightly framed this debate in terms of contaminated blood and hepatitis C; understandably, the good briefing from the Haemophilia Society has done the same. However, the briefing also refers to co-infection with HIV.

When the Minister looks at these issues, I urge her not to forget those who have been infected, or co-infected, with HIV as a consequence of contaminated blood products. Of the 1,252 people who have been infected with HIV in this way, 932 have died so far. Among the 322 of those people who are still living, one of them is my constituent, Andrew March, who was contaminated at the age of nine. He is now 39, so his entire life has effectively been ruined. He has been a staunch campaigner. He was the applicant in the judicial review proceedings on this matter, and yet after 30 years he is still waiting for any proper redress.

I feel strongly that this issue is the responsibility of Government, and the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) was also clear on that. To some extent, the admission of liability is not the central question. The previous Minister wrongly said that the reason why proper payments were made in the Republic of Ireland was that there was an admission of liability. In fact, payments were being made there before the admission was made, as the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) pointed out very clearly, having a clear knowledge of what happened; the hon. Gentleman is not here today, but he has done a lot of work on this issue.

We do not need to get tied up in those matters of liability, but personally I would like an admission of responsibility from the Government, because, for some of the reasons that have already been given, much more could have been done. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a delay because of a failure to see what medical knowledge was showing about contamination. Even when that contamination was known, there was a failure to treat products so that they were no longer harmful.

My final point is about funding. Reference has already been made to the Skipton Fund in relation to hepatitis C, but there are similar problems with the Macfarlane Trust. I have been told that it is effectively falling apart; that the review of its probity, of its success, has been ignored; that there is very poor communication between it and sufferers; and that it is underfunded.

The result of all that is that people die. People die because they are not getting sufficient treatment or sufficient medication that they need to deal with their conditions. HIV is a treatable condition, but for those who have serious health problems it can still be fatal and that issue is not being addressed. In the short term, I ask the Minister to look at both the lump sum and ongoing support payments, but in the longer term what we need is a full and final settlement.

I suspect that many Ministers, particularly junior Ministers, wonder how much difference they have made on a lot of issues when they finally leave their posts. However, I also suspect that this is one discrete area, with a defined number of victims, where the Minister could make a difference if she chooses to put her mind to it, in a way that some of her predecessors have not.

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

A Welsh member of the all-party group on haemophilia and contaminated blood recently told me that every meeting and correspondence that it has with the Government ends with the words, “The Minister will look into this.” Does my hon. Friend agree that a promise really to get to grips with this issue now would be incredibly important, not least for Colin—aged seven, from Newport—who died in my constituency from having contaminated blood? We must also remember the very young victims whom we are campaigning for.

[Mr Slaughter]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I know that those views are shared by many Members on both sides of the House.

We are probably not looking for answers today, although we will listen to what the Minister has to say. She has heard clearly that we can do more than just look into the issue: we can achieve results for the remaining victims of these terrible diseases and their families.