Contaminated Blood and Blood Products

David T C Davies Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

Appropriately, I am wearing a black tie today both to acknowledge the fact that many people have died because of contaminated blood products before they had the opportunity to see a full debate on the subject in this Chamber, and to pay respects to a constituent of mine, James McVey, who died tragically at the weekend at the age of just 18. His death is not related to this issue, but I am sure that all Members on both sides of the House would want to join me in sending our condolences to his family and friends.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for bringing this long-neglected issue firmly back on to the political agenda. It is to our great shame that it is necessary to have a debate on it so long after the original events, and it is an indictment of previous Administrations that many of the issues surrounding the contaminated blood disaster remain unresolved to this day.

The case for making adequate reparations to the victims and their families has been eloquently made both today and on previous occasions in this House and in the other place. However, I have never heard a more stirring description of the tragedy and its effects on individual lives than the emotional personal account of one young gentleman in Committee Room 7 yesterday. His words will stay with me for a very long time.

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

In common with many other speakers, the hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case for compensation, and I think all Members have sympathy with that. However, given the pain being caused by the £1 billion saved by getting rid of child benefit for higher rate taxpayers, where does he think that £3 billion will come from? Does he have the courage to tell the House which budget we should cut to pay that compensation?

[Steve Rotheram]

I am being encouraged to make a party political point, but as my mum used to say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” and, believe me, if I were sitting on the Government Benches now I would be saying exactly the same thing. On this issue, it does not matter what political party we are in.

The NHS failed almost 5,000 people. Through using contaminated blood and blood products, it made ill people more ill, sometimes fatally so. It made perfectly healthy individuals—accident victims requiring blood transfusions, for example—unwell for life. Indeed, as many have said this fiasco was, in Lord Winston’s words,

“the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS”.

The state should have gone out of its way decades ago to compensate victims financially and in kind, not only to accept responsibility, but proactively to alleviate the adverse impact of its mistakes. Instead, successive Governments have prevaricated; they have been reluctant to acknowledge fault and loth to carry the can financially.