Infected Blood Inquiry

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, this is a matter almost too awful to contemplate, but I most heartily welcome the remarks of the Minister as she started the debate. I pay tribute to the exceptional work of Sir Brian Langstaff and his staff—I think we all share that sentiment. This is not a party-political matter; we all of us share responsibility.

“The NHS is the envy of the world.” That has been said so often you can hear those words still ringing around this old Chamber, but it has not been true for a very long time. The system of care and compassion that we created with such hope has gone horribly wrong. It has gone more than wrong; it is much worse than that. There have been

“systemic, collective and individual failures to deal ethically, appropriately and quickly”

with the infected blood scandal. Those terrible words are taken directly from Sir Brian’s report. Yet the main point I want to make follows the remarks in the pointed speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. It is that although this particular scandal is a national humiliation, it is far from unique. It is not just infected blood; it is the Post Office Horizon scandal—25 years and still going strong. It is the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, the Rotherham grooming scandal—that was more than three decades ago and is still not finished —and the Mull of Kintyre aviation disaster, which took nearly 20 years for the truth to be revealed. It is the Grenfell Tower calamity and, as we heard before this debate, the Afghan resettlement problem. There have been so many occasions where the public have been betrayed by their public servants.

Why does this happen? Sometimes it is through direct dishonesty, but more often perhaps because what we are dealing with is all a little uncomfortable—because it would rock the boat, because it is easier to leave the squidgy bits locked in the bottom drawer, because “We are the envy of the world and we know best”. It is the arrogance of the untouchables. The system operates on a self-serving motto: “Hold your nose, tick a box— job done, move on quickly and leave it all to someone else to clear up”. These disasters—infected blood, Horizon, Hillsborough and all the rest —were not accidents. Sir Brian makes that abundantly clear, and his conclusions are chilling. To paraphrase him, ordinary people—families, children—put their faith in the Government and in the system that was supposed to keep them safe, and we failed them.

The priority of our public service system is no longer to serve the public; its priority has become to serve the system itself. This is an awful conclusion to reach but, on the basis of the evidence, it is an unavoidable conclusion. The Minister said that it is a mark of shame on everyone concerned. I would like to expand on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, in her extremely powerful speech and ask the Minister: after all this time and all this suffering, how many public servants have been disciplined, demoted or dismissed for their part in this tragedy of infected blood? If the answer is none or that even after 50 years the system is somehow unable to come forward with any figures, that seems just another example of the system winning again.

I have no doubt that the Government’s fulsome apology is genuine, as was the fulsome apology given by the previous Government, and there is compensation. Justice requires compensation, but compensation will not be enough if we do not learn from this tragedy and prevent these scandals happening again. How do we make public servants properly responsible not just for the sins of commission but for the sins of omission—the grotesque lack of candour and honesty that Sir Brian highlighted? He suggests we should pass into law a duty of accountability and candour, and I am delighted that the Prime Minister has said that the Government intend to pick up this challenge. That was repeated by the Minister today. When will this proposal see the light of day—when will we go to the Bill? I notice that the noble Lord, Lord, Lord Bichard, suggested that it would be in April. I hope that it will be brought forward as a matter of urgency. Why do we need to wait until April for something which has been with us for so long? I understand that it is complicated but it is enormously important, otherwise all our hand-wringing will have gone to waste and all the wrongs will be repeated and the suffering of the little children will go on.

This new Government have an opportunity not just to put this terrible experience behind us—that really is not the point—but to put it to use to repair and rebuild what was once our great British establishment and the relationship between the state and the individual.

The headlines will be all about compensation—rightly so—but if we leave it just at that we will be in danger of simply ticking a box and moving on. The real change we need will require not just compensation but the courage to take on all the many vested interests that any legislation will encounter, and to see the job through.

The Government say that they will act to ensure that this kind of behaviour will never happen again and, in that objective at least, I wish them well.