Infected Blood Inquiry

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I think every speaker in this debate has paid enormous credit to the comprehensive and important report from Sir Brian Langstaff. There is so much weight in there in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. I particularly focus on paying extreme credit and respect to the individuals—the infected and the affected—who provided the heart of the testimony to Sir Brian’s report. They were talking about the most awful personal experiences. They were crucial to Sir Brian’s work and it is important that we focus on their contribution.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, for securing this debate, for her very clear introduction and for the tone which the Government have adopted on this, as indeed the previous Government did. This has been a very powerful debate but I want to pick up on a word used by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard: complacency. Following on from the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, I have to ask about where the complacency has lain, and where the responsibility for the complacency has lain.

The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, said to make public servants and officials responsible. He talked about the Civil Service. However, I think we have to ask where the leadership comes from. Ultimately, there is political responsibility. That is where responsibility is supposed to lie in our system. I am afraid I am going to say something that may feel uncomfortable to many sides of your Lordships’ House: the next time noble Lords feel tempted to use the phrase “world-leading” in a self-congratulatory tone, please ask, “Is this justified and are we using this as an excuse not to be better?” That is very often how it comes across. If that is the message delivered from the political leadership down to the people who are, after all, in your hands as a political leader when you are the Minister, what is it going to direct them to do? Please ask these questions. When people come to you and say that everything is fine but at the same time there are campaigners saying, “We have been mistreated; the state is not working here—it has not delivered for us”, please do not just take reassurance from the Civil Service, a quango, or whoever to say, “No, it is fine”. Please keep asking questions.

Your Lordships’ House is very aware of this, so I am not going to go through it all, but Sir Brian Langstaff highlighted some absolutely wrong things that happened, such as the intentional destruction of documents, and the decision by the Government to use phrases such as “no conclusive proof” of a link between blood products and HIV to give false comfort and misrepresent risks. If there is one sentence from Sir Brian’s report that needs to be highlighted, it is this:

“This disaster was not an accident”.


Let us look at the facts. World Health Organization advice from the 1950s warned of the risks, as well as ways to minimise them, such as treating blood and restricting those who could donate.

A great deal has already been said, so I will not go over the same ground about the duty of candour and the so-called Hillsborough law report. But I will stress that I am confident your Lordships’ House will be focusing on the detail of that Bill and what we might be able to do to make it stronger. I look forward to doing that. I pick up again the words of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, about the need for civic and public involvement, and true democracy in terms of making sure that Hillsborough law is as strong as it can possibly be.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Featherstone and Lady Keeley, both spoke about the delays to compensation for the affected, as opposed to the infected. I will make a couple of additional points. I am particularly drawing on the briefing from the campaign group Factor 8. Looking at the applications for interim payments of £100,000 to the eligible estates of those who died, I have a specific question for the Minister. Will the funding for legal help be available in advance to families who may be applying for it? Having to self-fund and claim the money later is obviously going to be utterly impossible for many.

We have covered a huge amount of ground in what has been a harrowing debate, so I will make two final points. First, many references have been made—I particularly pick up the point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield—to the Orgreave inquiry. Where is it? I repeat that question to the Minister. Secondly, when we think about the compensation, we have to think, in this context, about the Windrush scandal and the second scandal of how Windrush compensation has simply not worked out.

I do not think anyone has yet mentioned this, but the parallel has to be drawn with the issues raised in the so-called Cumberlege report, First Do No Harm—vaginal mesh, sodium valproate and Primodos. These were significantly after the events of the infected blood scandal; however, the same things kept happening again and again, and we have to highlight that.

I also want to highlight something not in the medical field. On 21 October I will be joining the Truth About Zane campaign, concerning the terrible death of seven year-old Zane Gbangbola. He was killed when flooding released toxic chemicals from a historic landfill site. There were total failures of government action after that. I hope we will hear positive news from the Government, in keeping with Sir Keir Starmer’s previous promise to hold an independent inquiry into Zane’s death. There are so many issues here.

I circle back to where I started. We have individual failures and structural failures, but let us not just blame the way things are structured. We also have to ask: why do we not have a state that functions for its people? We should be asking some very deep questions about the way this place, the other place and the whole British Government are structured.