Oral Answers to Questions

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 11th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Quin]

We are all struggling over the opportunity to endorse what my hon. Friend says, because it is absolutely right and we do not say it enough. A huge amount of hard work is done by civil servants at local and national level. We appreciate the work undertaken by them and I very much welcome her bringing it to the Chamber today.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

T6. The Paymaster General and I have been having a parliamentary tussle to get some basic factual information about the steps the Government are taking following the recommendations in Sir Brian Langstaff’s second interim report. Five hundred people have died since the inquiry was set up. On average, one person dies every four days. This group of people have very little trust in the system, which has let them down for so many decades. I know that the Paymaster General is a decent and compassionate man, so I ask him to step away from the Government non-speak and to provide the basic factual information that has been requested to that group of people, who are waiting desperately for the Government to act quickly.

[Jeremy Quin]

I take enormously seriously what the right hon. Lady says on this issue, on which she has campaigned long and hard and very successfully. We are now in the final stages, as she knows. We have received the second interim report on compensation, which we did not anticipate until February, but it has arrived and I am delighted that it has. It is real stuff to get our teeth into while we wait for the final report. We are doing a lot of work at pace.

To reassure the right hon. Lady, I chaired a meeting with Ministers from across Government last week. I have a bilateral meeting next week and I anticipate having more ministerial meetings, which I will chair, the week after. She has asked me to set out every single internal meeting I have on this subject, which is not normal in the formulation of policy. I do not intend to list every single meeting that I have internally or with other Ministers, but I assure her that we are working at pace to come up with a constructive response to the report.