Vaginal Mesh Implants: Compensation

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness for securing this debate and the panel for its review and tenacious follow-up of remaining recommendations, particularly recommendations 3 and 4 on financial compensation.

I am a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Inquiries Act. With recent reports from statutory public inquiries on Grenfell and Covid-19, non-statutory inquiries such as this can be overlooked. While Grenfell and Covid-19 clearly needed the statutory model, it often comes with unhelpful TV images of banks of lawyers, looking like a courtroom. I do not want to pre-empt the publication of our report in the next few weeks, but it seems that both the noble Baroness and Bishop James Jones, who led the non-statutory Hillsborough review, managed to obtain the trust of victims’ groups, which is essential to that model. Along with my noble friend Lady Sugg, I too applaud those groups who were maturely able to see the advantages and merit of the non-statutory process and, I hope, found it less arduous than the courtroom-type hearings.

A number of recent inquiries—into the Post Office, Grenfell and infected blood—have led to the establishment of compensation schemes. Given the systemic failures outlined so clearly in this review and the avoidable harm caused, I would be grateful if the Minister could outline fully what distinguishes this request from those of the other schemes, if His Majesty’s Government’s position has changed since 4 July. Now that His Majesty’s Government are overseeing a number of these schemes, I hope there is co-ordination over the levels of compensation given, for instance over the costs of care in the home, so that there are comparable tariffs across the schemes. But the request for a redress agency, and the three separate schemes in advance of this, sits in a landscape of similar medical schemes—on variant CJD, vaccine damage and thalidomide, to name just a few. Why are these three schemes not just as worthy as those other medical schemes? I hope the Minister can justify this distinction.

In relation to vaginal mesh, will His Majesty’s Government not have had to consider how to justify on objective, reasonable grounds a decision that looks, prima facie, like indirect discrimination against women? I suspect that, more tellingly, the reason will be to do with the costs. As the review outlines, in other countries big pharmaceutical companies and the suppliers of devices contribute. Will the Minister undertake to meet these companies and ask them to bring a full assessment of the costs to them of litigation, both successful and unsuccessful? Could she also prepare a full assessment of the cost to the public purse of leaving this just to litigation?

By a full assessment I mean, inter alia, the legal costs and compensation paid out by NHS trusts in successful claims, the costs not recovered from the other side even in successful cases, the often unrecoverable lost time of medical staff having to attend court and prepare witness statements, and the costs of court time and of class actions being brought against the Secretary of State. Even if the HPT class action has been discontinued, what was the civil servant time, ministerial time, and Government Legal Department time involved in the case—and the cost to the public purse of debates and Questions in Parliament, including the private office time preparing the Minister and sitting in the Box? Could the companies and public purse assessments be compared to the costs of running a scheme similar to those I have outlined?

There are also non-financial costs borne by the victims and society. The awful testimonies of the debilitating effects of surgery are harrowing—I am so grateful that my loved ones have always had amazing NHS care. But perhaps there are women struggling with their disabilities who think, “If I had a bit extra to buy some help, I could get back to work, maybe just part-time”, or women who are managing their lives and thinking, “I could do some work, but now I have to take on litigation. That is really the final straw”.

The country needs as many people as possible in the workforce. Can the noble Baroness request any relevant information that the DWP holds in relation to these women? For instance, how many are in that situation? Would the noble Baroness be content for women who might be listening today to write to her to outline such situations—and, of course, add the civil servant cost of replying to that correspondence to the full assessment I outlined above?