Contaminated Blood

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Burt]

My latest understanding is that the Penrose inquiry has said that later this month it will announce when it will report so I think that by the end of January the leader of the inquiry will have announced when publication will take place. I will touch on that later; the non-reporting so far is one problem that we have had to deal with.

Let me give one further brief story as part of the background to the statistics. I have been privileged to work with one family where three brothers died. To give an indication of what that meant, the sister wrote to me:

“the story of my three brothers, all dead, as a direct result of the treatment given to them by the NHS. The impact on the family? A devastation that time has not and never will heal, owing to the lack of acknowledgement over these deaths by both the Government and the medical profession…Family life is never the same with any bereavement, and we can only cherish their memories and their offspring, but there are still so many un-answered questions as to the decisions made”.

Each of us has a number of stories that we could raise, and I apologise for not being able to read out more.

Why now? The answer is that there has been a lot going on in recent times. This Parliament began with the very first Back-Bench debate, initiated by the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson), who I am pleased to see in his place. I am sure that that helped lead to an announcement in January 2011 by the then Secretary of State of further changes to the funds providing payments, but underlying issues remained outstanding. We were all approached.

On 18 October 2013, I asked the Prime Minister a question on the issue. I will not repeat the detail, but it got a warm response from the Prime Minister who understood the problem and promised that he would put support into it, meet the gentleman that I wanted him to see, and take it up. To put this in historical context, the reason for approaching him was that the scale of the tragedy is certainly on a par with those issues for which the Prime Minister has apologised in this Parliament—Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday—having the bravery to recognise what had been done in the past, with the authority that only a Prime Minister could have.

We took the Prime Minister at his word. I was proud to take my friend, my constituent and his colleague to that meeting. We said we needed No. 10 to offer to work on what more might be done to close off the issue, and since then the Prime Minister has indeed put members of his policy team to work, together with my hon. Friend the Minister. I am grateful for the Prime Minister’s engagement and I am, of course, hopeful. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will say more about that work.

My question was followed up infinitely more powerfully by a debate on 29 October led by Paul Goggins, in which he outlined some of the issues that we agree are still to be settled. He spoke principally about the funds and people’s finances, the bureaucracy and inconsistency of the funds, the discrimination suffered by those who did not fit certain categories, the crude distinction between stage 1 and stage 2 hepatitis C sufferers, the inadequacy of funds for making discretionary payments, and the absence of transparency and accountability over the years. He suggested that if the Government were to continue to reject a public inquiry, there should be an alternative process, including:

“In addition to fair financial support, those who have suffered so much are still owed a full explanation and a sincere, profound apology.”—[Official Report, 29 October 2013; Vol. 569, c. 201WH.]

Hovering in the background of all our deliberations were a Government who were prepared to take on a public inquiry. In 2008, the then Health Minister for Scotland, now the First Minister, announced to her great credit the sort of judicial investigative inquiry on the transmission of infectious disease via transfusions in Scotland that has not been held for the UK as a whole. It covers effectively all the major issues dealt with by Archer, and will very likely have comments to make that will have a bearing on UK-wide policy. It may well have implications for financial considerations in respect of responsibility for what happens and what needs to be done.

As I told the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke), we do not yet have that report, but while MPs have waited for it we have not been idle. In April the all-party group and additional colleagues working with me, held two public meetings at Westminster. We wanted to keep the community informed of what was happening, discuss expectations and hear from them. As MPs attacked the issue yet again, we were asking the Government to focus on the key issues. Those meetings helped to reinforce our sense that we were talking about the right themes—the changes that life had brought for people who had not expected to live, and the financial considerations that that now brought them. There is the problem of leaving anything; the problem of mortgage and insurance; and the problem of the bereaved and the dependants, which we all know very well. They all have to be in the front of the Government’s mind as they approach this.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way and pay tribute to him for the tremendous amount of work he has done on the issue. It would be fair to say that since he has been involved there has been a degree of progress, although not total progress, because we will not have that until we get some action. Does he agree that many of the families feel very strongly about this and often feel frustrated by the lack of progress?

[Alistair Burt]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his kind remarks and I appreciate them very much. Yes, one thing we were told in our meetings in April was that people are sick of coming to Parliament. They have been coming for many years and many of them will feel that even today, but this is the best we can do as Members of Parliament. We know that those on both Front Benches are listening.