Infected Blood

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe (Con)]

I am, as ever, very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for her kind words. I can assure her that it has been a privilege for me to be involved as a House of Lords Minister in working through these proposals and to be standing here today to announce them. I am more than ready to continue that work as we fashion the compensation scheme, together with Sir Robert Francis and those impacted by this scandal.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, as a former Secretary of State for Health, I very much share the sense of failure that was forcefully expressed by the Prime Minister in the other place yesterday. From my personal point of view, I want to say how deeply sorry I am for the pain and misery that so many of the victims and their families have experienced.

I remind my noble friend that that is exactly the same expression of regret that I made in another place on 10 January 2011, and which my noble friend at this Dispatch Box repeated on the same day. At that time, as my noble friend will recall, we had conducted a review over some months, following Lord Archer of Sandwell’s independent inquiry. We believed, on the basis of the ministerial review of Anne Milton, the Member of Parliament for Guildford, that we were substantially meeting—and enhancing—the level of support payment for relief that would be provided to victims and their families and meeting many of their needs. Clearly, it was inadequate, and the Prime Minister has expressed that view.

Can my noble friend say whether the Government will now focus very hard on the question of why I, he, our ministerial colleagues, and other Ministers and other Secretaries of State—I heard Andy Burnham say more or less exactly the same thing yesterday—believed that we were doing what was needed and what was right at that time but did not share the view that we needed to make compensation payments on the scale of those that were made in Ireland because we did not share the same liability as had been accepted in Ireland?

That was clearly not true. Ministers were repeatedly advised that something was true which was not true. That is not to absolve us, because we take responsibility as Secretaries of State for our departments and for what has been done or has failed to be done during our time in office, and collectively we must accept that responsibility. However, this must be a case of never letting the scale of that failure within government be repeated in the future in any other circumstances. I hope that my noble friend can say that that internal examination, based on the inquiry, will be proceeding forthwith.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend and well remember the Statement that he refers to, which I repeated in this House in January 2011. He is exactly right. Both he and I were advised at the time that there was no comparability between the situations in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom—that they were entirely different. That was not true, but it was the advice that we received. We did as much as we could, I am sure my noble friend will agree, to honour the spirit of the late Lord Archer’s report, which was at the time a very thorough piece of work, although he did not have access to all the evidence, as we now are aware. So it does raise the question of how successive Secretaries of State for Health in the Labour Government, the coalition Government and no doubt beyond were advised in the way that they were by officials. This is a question that merits the closest scrutiny and I undertake that that will be done.