Contaminated Blood

Debate between Richard Fuller and Mike Kane

Thursday 15th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

I stand in this House in the footsteps of giants. My predecessor Paul Goggins was a tireless campaigner on this issue, and his predecessor, Lord Morris of Manchester and former Member for Wythenshawe, was also a tireless campaigner on it, so I am humbled to stand before the House as their successor.

I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) for securing the debate and congratulate him on his work. There are days in this Chamber, particularly as we approach a general election with the cut and thrust of politics, when I do not know what we do here. Today is not one of those days. The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) summed it up correctly: this debate shows the House of Commons at its best.

I want to relate the tale of a few constituents of mine: Fred and Eleanor Bates and Peter Mossman. I have been working with them over the few months that I have been a Member of Parliament and we have had the full support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), for which we are grateful. Eleanor is now 60 years old. She has been married to Fred for 38 years. Fred is a haemophiliac who used to have a 5% clotting factor but now has a 0.0001% clotting factor. It is believed that this reduction is a result of the contamination. Before 1982-83, he received plasma and cryoprecipitate on demand when he had a bleed. After that, he was switched to factor VIII. In 1991, he was visited by another constituent of mine, Peter Mossman of the north-west group of the Haemophilia Society, who brought Fred a leaflet about hepatitis C. Fred visited the hospital to check this out and discovered that he did indeed have the condition. In fact, the hospital had known about his condition for almost a decade. Frightened and worried, Fred and Eleanor researched the main symptoms of hepatitis C: fatigue, sclerosis of the liver, liver cancer and ultimately death. They believe that the disease is now having an impact on Fred’s short-term memory function.

Fred worked as a weigher at C. H. Johnson on Bradnor road on the Sharston industrial estate in my constituency. In 1980, he was given a choice by his consultant: he could carry on working and face possible death within a year or retire and live longer. Fred was 31 years of age when he faced that choice. The choice was made more complicated by the fact that he and Eleanor were raising two small children. His income went from a respectable £145 a week to £45 in state benefit.

With hardly any clotting agent left, Fred now receives prophylactic treatment every other day, in the form of 1,500 units of factor VIII. It is not just the victims of this injustice that suffer; it is often their carers as well. Eleanor was unable to return to work after the kids fled the nest, because hepatitis C is an unpredictable disease. Fred can be fine at 8 am but have a bleed half an hour later and have to go back to bed. Eleanor has to dress his wounds, as well as doing the cooking and cleaning. She has felt unemployable for a numbers of years because of her home care duties.

Fred and Eleanor now have to deal with the Caxton Foundation. May I make this promise to the House? If I am ever fortunate enough to stand at either of those Dispatch Boxes, I will never hide behind the fact that we have set up a third-party organisation to pass the buck to. We should accept responsibility here in this House; this is where the buck should stop. Eleanor has described the Caxton Foundation to me as a sheer and utter waste of time; she feels as though she is begging when claiming. The system does not allow a retrospective claim. She put in for a respite holiday, but it did not come through, so she missed her holiday slot. Other issues have been identified. There are no separate forms for carers to apply for their own grants, and winter fuel payments are counted as income. The stress has ruined the lives of many carers of those who suffer from this condition.

I want to talk about some of the organisers. I mentioned Peter Mossman earlier. He is 71 years old, and he has a 5% clotting factor. He was a woodcutter, a machinist and a professional driver with Goodwin’s coaches in Manchester. Like Fred, he too faced the choice between giving up work and carrying on. He gave up work when he was 42. He has searched high and low for answers on the disease. His kids have only ever known him fighting. Working with Alf Morris, he set up the Manor House support group, and I pay tribute to him and Alf for that. He lost his sister, Margaret, recently. She was an affected carrier, and she died at the age of 63, her liver ravaged.

These campaigners believe that there should be no differentiation between stages 1 and 2 when it comes to payments. As has been mentioned, we are one of the few countries not to have adequately compensated the victims. There should be a decent one-off payment with subsequent annual payments.

[Richard Fuller]

A constituent of mine has also raised this point. Does the hon. Gentleman not find it odd that, as a result of this failure by the Government, the victims have to apply for a discretionary payment and that there is no substantial up-front payment? There seems to be a complete imbalance between right and wrong.

[Mike Kane]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman.

Many of the victims have lost the will to fight. There should be greater anger there, but they cannot deal with that anger and fight at the same time. Fred, Eleanor and Peter tell me that they will fight until they die. They have seen their stock of affected friends die horribly, and they feel that that is all they have to look forward to. They believe that it is time to admit that we made a mistake, and to allow those people to get on with their lives. Hope is real. There is no such thing as false hope. There might be false science, and there might have been false starts, but hope is real for those people. We in this Chamber today should help them to reignite that hope.

Finance Bill

Debate between Richard Fuller and Mike Kane

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller]

My hon. Friend speaks from great experience and is, as usual, exactly on the point. For many small business people, the biggest constraint is time: they have to be the sales person, the accountant, the HR person and the form filler. The policy that has given rise to new clause 11 is supposed to be helping those people, but I think there are many other ways we can support our small businesses that would have a greater impact.

One of those is that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills should lose its great focus on a grand industrial policy, centred on our large corporations, and start to show a bit of passion about our small businesses. I know that the Secretary of State is a good friend of the Treasury Bench—obviously, he is a member of it—but somehow we are not getting the focus and heart for our small businesses that we should be getting, and it would be good to hear that voice coming through louder and clearer.

I am drawn by Opposition Members’ eloquence on the questions they are raising about this policy. It did not occur to me at the start of our support for the policy that it was going to be a big policy that would have an impact on many businesses. I would be interested to hear an update from the Minister on where the policy is taking us and what our goals are when it comes to promoting employee shareholding. What are his concerns? Does he share my concern that, in trying to put together promotion of employee shareholding and reductions in employee rights, we may be failing to make progress on two issues, rather than making progress on both?

[Mike Kane]

It is a delight to follow the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller), who spoke with such authority about his work now and previously with small businesses. It was a pleasure to serve with him on the Finance Bill Committee, where generally he spoke loyally from the Government Benches on his party’s agenda, even though he disagrees slightly with the policy before the House now. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans), who spoke articulately and ably, using his experience as a former trade union official.

I believe that shares for rights as it has been proposed lacks common human dignity. We know that the main purpose of Government is to protect individuals, communities and their property from exploitation and harm; Government must also provide a stable economic, social and legal framework for businesses and economies to thrive. The proposal does not do that. As I mentioned earlier, Lord O’Donnell described shares for rights as a form of modern-day slavery. It creates a two-tier market and a two-tier work force—one part having sold its rights and the other retaining them. I think that that is wrong for our economy.

The policy was announced with great fanfare in 2013, but the shares for rights scheme cannot be described as anything other than a massive flop. It is also proving to be another bone of contention in our fractured coalition. The Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), and the Secretary of State are nowhere to be seen near the proposal. The real problem, though, as the Chancellor has found, is that it has been impossible to get employer organisations to back the scheme. As my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) said, according to the most recent information we have—hopefully, the Minister will update us—there were 19 expressions of interest by December last year. The Office for Budget Responsibility says it could be used as a tax dodge, costing us—the Treasury—nearly £1 billion a year. In this age of austerity, that is the last type of policy we need to be introducing.

Ministers seek to introduce the scheme without proper discussion, and without proper consultation, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn said, and have proceeded in what can only be described as a very chaotic way. Following the publication of the details of the scheme, a Government source was quoted as saying that the scheme was on “life support”, but Ministers still went ahead. As was mentioned earlier, John Cridland, director-general of the CBI, said that this was a niche idea that businesses really do not want. There is unanimity among people who really care about employers and their rights and those Opposition Members who believe that employees should also be shareholders and work hard in their small and medium-sized enterprises, where most employees now reside.