Oral Answers to Questions

Ian Sollom Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Labour promised free breakfast clubs in every primary school, and the first 750 will open in April, giving every child the best start in life through our plan for change. It will also put up to £450 a year back in the pockets of working families. I am delighted to say that two of the breakfast clubs will be opening in the constituency of the Leader of the Opposition in April, and I hope she will welcome them when they do.

[Ian Sollom (St Neots and Mid Cambridge-shire) (LD)]

Q5. On Monday, the Prime Minister talked about creating defence jobs across the country as we rebuild our defence industrial capacity. Will he and the Government bring forward an urgent plan for skills in the defence sector, and does he agree with his Education Secretary that the strategy for defence skills should sit purely under the Department for Education, and not an under-powered Executive agency?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Member for raising this issue, because it is a duty to increase our spending on defence and security, but it also provides an opportunity for jobs across the country—good jobs, well-paid jobs, skilled jobs, as he rightly identifies, and jobs with a real sense of pride, and we are working on that.

Infected Blood Compensation Scheme

Ian Sollom Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ian Sollom (St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire) (LD)]

Like others, I welcome the progress on the compensation scheme. Also like others, I would like to draw attention to two of my constituents who have suffered, and continue to suffer, because of the infected blood scandal.

First, there is my constituent who was infected with hepatitis C in 1993, two years after the cut-off date for the infected blood support scheme. As she told me at my surgery last week, her life has been utterly devastated. Her sense of betrayal is felt even more keenly because at the point of her infection all blood should have been tested for hepatitis C by law. She has suffered terrible physical and mental illness for most of her life, including infertility and anxiety from the stigma of her illness—which is why I do not mention her name—and she has experienced an impact on her personal relationships and career.

It was a cruel insult that my constituent, because she was infected after 1991 and was therefore not eligible for the infected blood support scheme, has been unable to access the crucial help that she needs to deal with the impacts I have mentioned. I welcome the removal of those cut-off dates in the new scheme, but I urge the Government urgently to provide proper clarity on how the new scheme will work for her and others like her who were infected after 1991. They need the details of exactly how it will work for them, and when they can expect to review the compensation that they so greatly deserve.

Secondly, I would like to mention the case of my constituent whose mother sadly died from hepatitis C in 1998. In his communications with me, he has pointed out that the information available on the gov.uk website is very confusing, as others have mentioned. He finds it often poorly written, which only adds to his frustration and emotional stress. Understandably, his main concern is that payments to the estates of those who have died from being given infected blood will be deprioritised and not excluded from any heads of loss. As others have pointed out, processes that delay these payments will result in many elderly affected people dying before receiving anything. Can the Government give assurances that siblings and children left behind now and in future will have the compensation safeguarded and will also receive what they rightly deserve?