May I first commend the hon. Member for Gedling (Michael Payne) for his maiden speech? I think we can all agree that it was very moving, and that he does great credit to his family and constituents. I apologise for not having been here for the first few minutes; I was running over from Portcullis House.
I had the privilege of being the Minister with responsibility for the infected blood compensation scheme. On 21 May, I brought the scheme to the Floor of the House, speaking from the Government Dispatch Box. In the six months prior, I had been determined—not knowing when the election would be called—to do everything I could to bring that compensation scheme to life after so much delay. That delay has been, as the hon. Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery) rightly said, totally unacceptable for too long.
In my remarks to the House, I will pay tribute to the victims, explain some of my experiences as a Minister, and make some observations on what lessons and next steps may need to take place. First, I acknowledge the work of my successor as Paymaster General, the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds). He has done virtually everything that I would have done, had the electorate overall given us a different outcome. Though I will always be available to members of the public to ask questions in this House, as is my responsibility as an Opposition Back-Bench MP, I believe that he is doing everything he can to move the scheme forward as quickly as possible, and I will come on to the mechanics of that in a moment.
During the month of May, I participated in 18 meetings. I met representatives of 40 groups in London, Leeds, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh. Each meeting was a profoundly emotional and moving moment for me and the officials who accompanied me. I met people who had gone through unimaginable suffering and uncertainty for not just a matter of months, but, in some cases, a number of decades. Some had been infected through their marriage. Some had been born as haemophiliacs and had been treated in ways that had the consequences we have spoken about today. Some had transfusions when giving birth to their children. Some received blood transfusions from imports that proved to be defective. Some had hepatitis C or hepatitis B. Some had HIV. Many had a combination of different conditions. Some had been family members of those who had been infected. It was a humbling but tragic set of moments. In those conversations, I looked those individuals in the eye and said, “I am deeply sorry on behalf of the British state.” It was a great privilege to be asked to do that on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, but we must learn lessons collectively from the enduring failure to come to terms with what has happened over the course of so many Governments and so many decades.
Many of the individuals I met had campaigned relentlessly, and I pay tribute to them today. I will not draw on individual names, because there are just so many people, and it would be unfair to all those whom I met. It was right that we brought forward a second interim payment, and it was right that we recognised the affected communities as well as the infected communities. It was tragic to see that there were sometimes disputes and divisions among many of the communities, because so much time had passed and so much fear existed around who would be looked after first, and about whether there would therefore be constraints on the money available.
I will step back to last year. After the Remembrance weekend in 2023, I was asked to move from my long tenure in different roles in the Treasury to the Cabinet Office to become Paymaster General. The year before, I had had some exposure to the challenge of making provision for compensation, and my immediate predecessor, the former Member for Horsham, had done a lot to try to ascertain what had been done collectively in government. The truth is that there was a very wide envelope: it may have been between £2 billion and £20 billion, and it had moved around according to what analysis could be done. That was because the parameters were fundamentally going to be based on how much compensation we would pay the different groups who were infected and affected. My predecessor started that process, and I pay tribute to him for what he did.
I also pay tribute to the former Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Godalming and Ash (Jeremy Hunt), who said to me when I left the Treasury, “You have one duty in that job. That is a moral duty to resolve the compensation scheme.” I honestly believe that he was critical in ensuring that we got to where we did on 21 May. I pay tribute, too, to the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham (Dame Diana Johnson), who did so much. At every question session, she sat just behind where I stand now, challenging me on what I was or was not doing. As the Paymaster General knows too well, there are always constraints; his officials will say, “I wouldn’t say that at this point.” We are always trying to say more, but I was acutely aware of how frustrated all the communities were, and that unless what I said was crystal clear, it would set off another storm of speculation on social media.
On the advice of my officials, I appointed Sir Jonathan Montgomery, who in the early months of 2024 assembled a small group of technical experts to advise on how to translate the compensation study of Sir Robert Francis into a full compensation scheme. We asked how, across the five heads of loss—injury impact, social impact, autonomy, the care award and the financial loss award—we could put a number on the relative suffering across all the different conditions. How could we put a number on the loss of a normal life, the loss of the ability to work, the loss of a sense of respect from the community in which people lived, and the stigma that other Members have referred to?
It was suggested to me at the time that I had done it the wrong way round—that I should have engaged with the community. I took the view that we were not going to get this resolved if we had done it that way round, but I knew it was critically important for all the communities to be engaged with, and I always had that expectation and intention. That is why, when I announced the scheme to the House on 21 May, I established a series of engagements where Sir Robert Francis met representatives of the infected and affected communities to go through the scheme and establish where changes needed to be made. Those engagements happened in June. I pay tribute to my successor, the Paymaster General, who engaged with the output of that work and—as per the timetable that had been agreed—made virtually all of the changes that were requested.
Today, understandably, I hear speed being urged across the House—that this should happen quicker to get the payments made. I totally understand that, and to some extent, I agree with it. However, I want to reassure the House that David Foley, who is now setting up and, I think, heading up the Infected Blood Compensation Authority as an arm’s length body of Government, is a superbly experienced civil servant. Neither I nor the Minister could have written the cheques ourselves to set up the processes and systems for evaluating entitlement and getting money out as quickly as possible. For those infected individuals who are alive—around 4,000—speed is obviously an imperative. The reason I took the decision on the £210,000 second interim payment, alongside the £100,000 from October 2022, was that I received advice, and I pressed and challenged my officials to get to a number that was the maximum that everyone would receive.
However, it is of course wholly necessary not just to get a first tranche fully paid out, but to get everyone else paid out. I acknowledge that there are questions about how to verify the date of infection, but despite all the bad things that have happened, obviously we must reconcile speed and effective decision making with ensuring that we pay the people who are entitled to the payments.
In Sir Brian Langstaff’s seven-volume report, of which I went to see the publication on Monday 20 May, he made a number of recommendations, and the Minister has indicated the Government’s willingness to honour those—the national memorial, and biannual meetings with those who have suffered in order to get to grips with the duty of candour. I want us as a House to be clear and honest about what we are really asking for, because the report spanned decades and different generations of Ministers, civil servants and orthodoxies in the medical profession. We need to encourage curiosity among individuals who see things going wrong but are held back from being truly candid because there tends to be group-think which prevents a thorough interrogation of what should be done.
Distortions happen, recollections have varied and medical professionals would make different judgments now from those they would have made at different points in the past. We need to be wise about what the duty of candour will look like, but we need to grasp the core argument that Brian Langstaff makes: we have to change the culture across Government and public service and in politics. I hope the Minister does not move on, but if he does, I hope he moves up. If he stays in his position, however, he can have an impact over time. When Ministers move, they have a received wisdom from their officials of a previous iteration, and we sometimes need to encourage the infusion of new Ministers to ask challenging questions and allow progress to be made.
I have profound concerns about public inquiries. A lot has been said in recent months about the multiple public inquiries that have occurred—how we can make them more systematic and aligned; the secretariats and the processes they run can obviously be streamlined. They are presented as the only cathartic method for the British state to come to terms with something that has gone wrong, and they are often not constrained in any way. They are typically led by retired High Court judges, and I have nothing against them, but we sometimes need to broaden the expertise such as by having economists and other people involved in looking at these things.
I pay tribute to Brian Langstaff, because the inquiry was a massive undertaking, but seven years is an enormous amount of time. I am not an expert on this, but let us think about the read-across to the covid inquiry. Many people have expectations of what that will deliver, but in other countries such analyses have brought forward recommendations and changes much more quickly. We have to get the balance right—not to cover up anything, but because we end up putting things into the long grass for so long. We as a Parliament need to come to terms with that.
I have probably spoken for too long, but I hope I can be forgiven for doing so given the role I had. I want to pay tribute to the work that has been done by those responsible for bringing us to this point. I pay tribute to all the victims and campaigners who have been so determined despite numerous knock-backs from Governments over the years. My own Government absolutely have to take their full share of the blame. Interim arrangements were made and ad hoc compensation schemes were set up, but responsibility was not taken by the British state, and it is absolutely right that we have done so now.
I do not think that social media is very helpful in trying to come to terms with the trauma of all this, or in giving clarity to those who need it. I wish David Foley and the IBCA well. I think there will be a series of letters about how to interpret individual recommendations, but he is setting up an efficient mechanism which, once it starts delivering, will deliver more and more rapidly—I am convinced of that. For some it cannot come soon enough, but I hope that very soon we can draw the right enduring lessons from this national scandal, and I hope it will never happen again.