Infected Blood Inquiry

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, on an earlier occasion I took the opportunity to ask a couple of questions on the Statement. I also took the opportunity, just after the report had been published, to reiterate the apology and the expression of deep regret which I gave in the other place on 10 January 2011. What has been possible in the intervening months is to read much more of the report and to read some of the people’s experiences in volume 2, as the Minister said in her extremely helpful introduction to the debate. It makes one feel very strongly the sense of injustice, trauma and suffering that so many families will have experienced.

I cannot possibly deal with all the issues in the report but want to focus on one or two matters from my personal experience. I was Secretary of State in 2010-11 when we made a further review of the Skipton Fund and made what we regarded as, and understood at the time to be, very significant additions to the hardship payments and support offered to sufferers and their families. Since the report was published, it begs a very serious question about the culture inside government and inside the Civil Service, which the Minister rightly referred to in her comments on recommendation 5, so I should like to talk about those.

By my estimation, there are at least 16 Members of your Lordships’ House who held ministerial office and were responsible, in one form or another, for the decisions that were made on these issues. I have probably forgotten one or two, so there may be more than 16. Back in 2010, many noble Lords will recall that Lord Archer of Sandwell had undertaken his inquiry. We came into office as a coalition with the intention we had expressed in opposition: our view was that the Government should have been more transparent and open with the Archer inquiry. In any case, we had a responsibility then to respond to it. Indeed, because of a successful judicial review of the previous Government’s decision, we had to make a new decision on compensation. The Archer inquiry had recommended that we should issue compensation comparable to that which had been provided in Ireland. We reviewed that decision and decided not to do so.

However, at that time we significantly increased the compensation; my noble friend Lord Howe on the Front Bench will have repeated that Statement in this House and will recall the widespread support that was given for what represented somewhere up to £130 million of additional support during the course of that Parliament. Anne Milton was my Minister in the ministerial team at that time. She undertook that review of the Skipton Fund, and in opposition and in government she had engaged very widely with the community and the beneficiaries of that fund, having spoken to very many of them. Anne Milton is now no longer in the other place and she is not here; she does not have a place where she can speak to these issues.

In volume 6 of the inquiry, which looks at the Government’s response to many of these events, towards the end of the section relating to the decisions we made at that time there is the following sentence expressing the view of the inquiry:

“What is … most disappointing about the response to the Archer Inquiry is the sense it leaves that government was looking to see what was the least that was required of it”.


That was absolutely not my experience, nor that of others in relation to the work that was being done by Ministers at that time. It certainly was not the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Primarolo, in the previous Administration—I know that to be a fact—nor that of Anne Milton. She was looking to do the most that we could do by way of adding to the hardship payments and the support we could provide, in what noble Lords will recall were very difficult financial circumstances, and at the time, in the other place and here, it was widely welcomed that we had done so.

I hope we will not misconstrue people’s intentions. We got things wrong and we did not know some things. Arguably, we were given inaccurate advice, particularly in relation to the question of there having been no finding of fault and what lay behind that. We are open to the accusation that we did not challenge it sufficiently, but I do not think we were ever looking to do the least that we could get away with; we were absolutely trying to achieve the most that we could for the sufferers and their families.

The second thing, in passing, is that all Ministers, pretty much at any moment, seem to have been accused of not having instituted a public inquiry. There may have been other occasions when a public inquiry would have made sense, but trying to do so in 2010, in the immediate wake of the Archer inquiry, probably made no sense. It would be good for inquiries, when they seek to look with the benefit of hindsight, to try to put themselves in the position of those who were making decisions at the time. It would not have made any sense to have instituted a public inquiry in circumstances where nobody was asking for one, we had just had the Archer inquiry and everybody was focused on our response to that. The issue simply did not arise in that sense.

I want to make just one more point, which is in any case the most important one. Reading earlier sections of which I was unaware, noble Lords will be aware of the frequency with which Ministers said that “at every stage” the Government

“has acted as swiftly as possible”,

or repeated the line taken many times over many years that

“the best available treatment … had been provided … in the light of medical knowledge at the time”,

whereas we now discover through the inquiry report that an official inside the Treasury said to the private office of the Chief Secretary at the time:

“I understand from DH that there are more than 500 sufferers”—


that is roughly half the total community at that time—

“who might in principle have contracted the virus after the stage at which hospitals might reasonably have been expected to use different forms of treatment”.

That links to the broader question of the stage at which it would have been possible to have secured greater self-sufficiency in the availability of blood products, to have found alternative forms of treatment and to have understood the nature of the risks and properly informed patients of them—which we now discover was not done. There is no evidence that it was done, even though it was asserted that it was.

We were very often in the position where we tried to make a decision and were in essence given two options: either we acknowledge fault or we say that there was no fault finding and that therefore compensation should not be available. The noble Lord, Lord Reid, is not in his place, but in 2003 he quite rightly—and, with the benefit of hindsight, very courageously—said, “That isn’t what it’s about; it’s about our moral responsibility”. There is an important space between fault on the one hand and no fault on the other, and that is where you have a responsibility for where harm occurs. The Government have a duty of care—I think this arose in the course of the litigation in 1989 and 1990—and will have breached that duty.

In the Government’s response to this inquiry, we need to think about finding a middle way between, on the one hand, no-fault compensation, and, on the other, restricting ourselves to providing support and compensation only in circumstances where fault has been found according to a test that parallels clinical negligence. The Government have responsibilities and a duty of care that is not limited to the best available treatment, according to medical knowledge at that time, in relation to that clinician. They have a wider responsibility; we need to find a more systematic way of understanding it and finding a place between those two extremes. The feeling that Ministers were always advised they had to choose between a test comparable to clinical negligence and purely ex gratia payments does not properly recognise the duty of care that they, and the Government, had to exercise in relation to those who had suffered as a result of the failures in treatment.