Budget Resolutions

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 Commons Chamber

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

The House will be surprised to know that I will talk about not billionaires, but ordinary people in my constituency of Kingston upon Hull North, for whom this Budget provides very little.

The Budget also provides very little investment, which we desperately need in Hull and the Humber. It exposes the reality of what levelling up actually means for the north as we come to the end of this Parliament. It is trifling; it is not transformative. The Chancellor mentioned Canary Wharf. That is not an area in need of levelling up. The Hull and East Riding devolution deal comes with headline-catching funding of £400 million, but it is spread over 30 years. That is £13.3 million a year shared between two councils. That comes nowhere near reversing Hull’s loss of £111 million a year since 2010. That stands in direct contrast to the Government’s economic transformation and integration deal with Rwanda, which comes with at least £370 million over five years—an average of £74 million a year—for levelling up in Rwanda.

I will focus mainly on what is not in the Budget: any compensation for the infected blood victims. That is despite the fact that 118 Members of Parliament from 10 parties wrote to the Chancellor last week, asking him to make an announcement on the allocation of funding for those people, and it comes after this House defeated the Government in December by voting to set up a compensation body through the Victims and Prisoners Bill.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on her excellent work on the contaminated blood scandal on behalf of all our constituents. Does she agree that it is heartbreaking for children to have watched their parents go through this?

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Diana Johnson]

My hon. Friend, who has also campaigned on the issue over the years, makes a good point; I will come to that.

Ministers received the final recommendations on compensation from Sir Brian Langstaff in April 2023. They also received the framework compensation document from Sir Robert Francis in April 2022, which allowed them to prepare for compensation to be paid. However, today there is not even an allocation for further interim payments to alleviate the immediate suffering of parents who have lost children, and children who have lost parents. Let me give the House an example of what that looks like. Sam Rushby, whose entire family—mum, dad and three-month-old baby sister—all died of AIDS by the time he was three, has received no compensation, and would benefit from the interim payments that Sir Brian Langstaff has recommended that the Government pay.

Paragraph 3.45 of the OBR document confirms that it has not been able to take into account plans for compensation for contaminated blood victims, as no money has been identified by the Treasury for that compensation. The OBR seems to have missed the point that Sir Brian has already made his final recommendations on compensation, and the Government do not need to wait until May to decide what to do next.

The Chancellor’s views have evolved over time. On 21 June 2019, Ann Dorricott, the widow of the Chancellor’s late constituent Mike Dorricott, who died because of the infected blood scandal, said in evidence to the inquiry that her husband was told in February 2014 by the Chancellor: “Don’t worry about this, we’ll sort it.” On 27 July 2022, the Chancellor told the infected blood inquiry that it could be seen as a “huge failing of democracy” that victims had waited so long for justice. After the first interim report from the infected blood inquiry, which set out that the Government should pay interim payments, the current Chancellor wrote to the Government on 3 August 2022, with two fellow former Health Secretaries, stating:

“The victims and their families deserve nothing other than the complete and immediate acceptance of Sir Brian’s recommendation. To refuse to do so would simply continue the injustice thus far handed out by the state to a group of innocent victims condemned to years of suffering and neglect.

Any delay to such payments, for instance by arguing that we need to wait for the inquiry to finish, for a new Prime Minister, or for Parliament to return, will sadly almost certainly see more of the victims die before they see justice.”

By the time the Chancellor appeared at the public inquiry on 28 July 2023, his views had changed. He then said:

“It is a very uncomfortable thing for me to say but I can’t ignore the economic and fiscal context because, in the end, you know, the country only has the money that it has”,

and that

“I can’t give you a sense as to the timescales.”

To play politics with victims of the infected blood scandal is, frankly, unforgivable. Those infected and affected are not responsible for the economic state of this country, and the Government have already accepted the moral case for paying compensation. The approach that Ministers are taking is tin-eared, with no allocation in this Budget for compensation. They tell us that they are working at pace, but they are not meeting with any of those infected or affected, or taking soundings from any of the campaign groups. They are hiring experts to advise them and refusing to give the names of those people, and decisions are being taken behind closed doors. This is not the way to treat people who have suffered and been dismissed and ignored for decades. The way this Government are behaving is shameful.