Contaminated Blood

Debate between Baroness Keeley and Andy Burnham

Tuesday 25th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

That was the direct content of the Stanford letter. There was a worry that the NHS was using such products in a completely different context, not understanding the difference between the two systems. That was the Stanford letter.

I am not standing here claiming to be an expert on all the papers, because I am not; I am saying what I know, from the people I have spoken to, to be wrong, and linking that to the documents in order to say what I believe to be the case. I may not be right, but we need to find out whether I am right, and that is the point that I will be putting to the Government.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

I was not going to intervene, but the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) made the point that generous treatment is needed. The victims of this NHS scandal are not receiving generous treatment. I have a constituent who was infected during the scandal as a child at the Royal Manchester children’s hospital. When he discovered that his cirrhosis, if it remained untreated, meant that he ran a 25% chance of developing liver cancer, he was told that he would be denied treatment by the NHS. The treatment he needed to clear the virus load from his system cost £100,000, and at that point he decided to use the ex gratia payment that he had been given—such a payment is supposed to be some compensation, although it is not enough—to try to do so. That is the situation that victims such as my constituent are in at the moment, and it is a disgrace: they should not be fighting this and having to use their own money for their own treatment.

[Andy Burnham]

It is a total disgrace. Absolutely there must be full, fair compensation now. I say to the Government, do not delay; do what Ireland and other countries have done. They should do that now. They raised expectations and they should do it. We would all support it.

Mrs Bullock, whom I mentioned, is reduced to sending begging letters. She has had to sell the family home and move away from everything. She is sending begging letters to the Skipton Fund for a stair-lift. She is not well herself now. How can that be right? We are making a woman who has lost everything send begging letters for a stair-lift, as she tries to cope on her own because her husband is no longer there. On the point about medical treatment, I understand that Mr Bullock may have been refused a liver transplant because his notes said that he was an alcoholic. There is injustice upon injustice here. It is absolutely scandalous. I hope the House now understands why, as I said at the beginning, I could not live with myself if I left this place without telling it directly what I know to be true.

[Andy Burnham]

Absolutely; I could not agree more. It is downright immoral to make these people carry on begging in the way they have been forced to do. The Government raised their hopes; they should deliver on the former Prime Minister’s promise and do what my right hon. Friend has just described.

The story is becoming clear, is it not? Warnings from the United States were ignored. There was a wish to drive on with these new products from the Oxford haemophilia centre: “We’ll just push them out there to find out the results before we really know whether there is infectivity.” Problems started to happen and perhaps there was the idea, “Oh no, the Government might be exposed to litigation. Let’s not have it in people’s notes so that a story does not build about how there has been negligence and people might have a compensation claim.” That is the story I have got; I do not know what anybody else thinks. Worse, for some people, they said, “Don’t just destroy their notes; falsify their notes.” That is the story. We need to find out whether it is true or not. In my view, these are criminal acts. They did not just happen by chance. A major injustice has happened here.

In making this speech tonight, I think of our late, great friend Paul Goggins, who I miss every single day. He did so much to advance the cause of justice for those who suffered. I also think of his constituents, Fred and Eleanor Bates, and of the promises I made to act for them in Paul’s name. In a 2013 debate like this one just before he died, Paul made an impassioned call for:

“A serious Government-backed inquiry…with access to all the remaining records and the power finally to get to the truth of what happened and why.”—[Official Report, 29 October 2013; Vol. 569, c. 201WH.]

His demand was as undeniable then as it is now, yet it pains me that, in the four years since then, this House has not moved it forward at all. If that continues to be the case after what I have said tonight, I am afraid that this Parliament will be complicit in the cover-up.

In reply to the demand of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North for an inquiry in a letter she wrote in October 2016, the Prime Minister said:

“the relevant documents have been published on the Department of Health and the National Archives websites and it is unlikely that a public inquiry would provide further information.”

In my view, that is a highly debatable statement. I do not think that a Prime Minister who has a good track record in helping to secure justice for those to whom it has been denied should have put her name to such a letter, which was probably drafted by the Department of Health. I remember exactly the same thing being said to me by those who opposed the setting up of the Hillsborough independent panel. “Everything is out there, it’s already known,” is what they always say. If the Prime Minister is confident in her assertion—I say this to the Minister—then rather than just publishing the documents the Government have selected as relevant, why not publish all the Government-held documents so that we can all decide whether her claim is true? On the basis of the evidence I have presented tonight, I believe it would be quite wrong for this House to resist that call.

To be clear, I am not calling for a lengthy public inquiry; I am calling for a Hillsborough-style disclosure process, overseen by an independent panel, which can review all documents held by government, NHS and private bodies. Just as with Hillsborough, the panel process should be able to view documents withheld under secrecy protections and make the necessary connections between documents held locally and nationally. It should then produce a report on the extent to which the disclosure of those documents tells a new story about what has happened.

So tonight I issue a direct challenge not just to the Government but to all parties in this House, including to my own Labour Front Bench and the Scottish National party: do the right thing and put a commitment in your election manifestos to set up this Hillsborough-style inquiry into contaminated blood. That, in my view, would be the most effective way to get as quickly as possible to the full truth and the whole story, as it was, effectively and efficiently, with Hillsborough.

I want to be very clear tonight with the Minister and with the House. If the newly elected Government after the general election fail to set up the process I describe, I will refer my dossier of cases to the police and I will request a criminal investigation into these shameful acts of cover-up against innocent people. I say to the Minister that the choice is hers. People are asking me why I do not just go straight to the police with the evidence I have, and I owe them an explanation. It is my view that the individual crimes I have outlined tonight are part of a more systematic cover-up and can only be understood as a part of that. If we refer them piecemeal to the police, they may struggle to put together the bigger picture of what lies behind the falsified medical records. That, in turn, may delay truth and justice. If the Government will not act, however, I believe a police investigation is the correct next step and that is what I will request. I cannot keep this information in my possession and not do something with it.

As we know, time is not on the victims’ side, so I will set a deadline. If the Government do not set up a Hillsborough-style inquiry by the time the House rises for the summer recess, I will refer my evidence to the police and request that investigation.

[Barbara Keeley]

My right hon. Friend is making an incredibly powerful case in his final speech in this place. The shadow Health team discussed this matter earlier and entirely support his call.

[Andy Burnham]

I am very pleased to hear that. I hope that means a commitment in the election manifesto of the kind I have just called for.

Policing

Debate between Baroness Keeley and Andy Burnham

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend puts it very well. Let us look at what Merseyside has said about what the proposed cuts would do. It has said that they would mean scaling down teams dealing with sexual assault and hate crime. Those are very serious implications. Where is the evidence to justify cutting the police on that scale? I have not seen it. I hope we hear it today, because this House cannot give permission to the Government to proceed with these cuts until they have made the case for what they are trying to do.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Is my right hon. Friend as surprised as me to hear that there are Members who do not understand that, in certain parts of the country, crime is rising, not falling. Crime in Greater Manchester rose by 14% in the 12 months up to June 2015 compared with the previous 12 months. Recorded violent crime rose by 39% over the same period. Members must take account of the fact that some parts of the country are different. We have guns and gang violence in Salford, and it is a very serious issue.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend puts her case very well. Crime may indeed be changing, and moving away from volume crime, such as car crime and burglary, but that is not to say that crime is falling. As I have said before, online crime is not adequately reflected in the crime figures. She rightly says that there are worrying increases in the most serious crimes in a number of areas, including in our part of the world, in Greater Manchester.

Health and Social Care

Debate between Baroness Keeley and Andy Burnham

Tuesday 2nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend anticipates me, because this is precisely the issue I am coming on to. Under the Lansley reorganisation, workforce planning went out of the window, and that led to today’s huge workforce crisis and hospitals being in the grip of private staffing agencies. That is the single biggest driver of the NHS deficit that I mentioned a moment ago, and I will talk about that shortly.

The Secretary of State gave us a pious warning about temperate language, yet this is the Secretary of State who today on the front page of The Daily Telegraph is saying that the NHS has enough cash and now must deliver:

“the time for debating whether or not”

it has enough money is over, it

“now needs to deliver its side of the bargain”.

Not for the first time, that is a statement by the Secretary of State that will have caused jaws to drop across the NHS. People will not forget the time he accused hospitals of coasting when they were in the middle of an A&E crisis, but even by his standards this was a staggering piece of spin.

The simple fact is that the NHS does not have enough money. In fact it is seriously short of money. It is facing a £1 billion deficit this year, with two thirds of hospitals in the red, which marks a major deterioration from what the Conservatives inherited in 2010, when there was a surplus of over £500 million.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

Are not some rather stupid decisions about to be made? Wythenshawe hospital has a £3 million deficit and is talking about cutting 28 district nursing posts. The Secretary of State said earlier that community resources are important. Of course they are, but if we are going to cut district nurses every time there is a trust deficit like the one at Wythenshawe, we are not going to get through another winter without a much more serious A&E crisis.

[Andy Burnham]

That is exactly the point. When we are in a crisis like this, short-term, knee-jerk cuts are made, which make the situation wrong in the long term.

When I raised these deficits in the election campaign, the Secretary of State said I was scaremongering, but just two weeks after the election the truth emerged. [Interruption.] He says I was, but we now know the truth. There was an £822 million deficit in the NHS last year, a sevenfold increase on the previous year. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says he is dealing with it. That is not good enough. That is appalling mismanagement of the NHS. Financial grip in the NHS has been surrendered on this Secretary of State’s watch, and things are looking even worse this year. Far from scaremongering, these issues are real and should have been debated at the last election. The NHS is now facing a £2 billion deficit this year. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) said earlier, that will mean cuts to beds, to staff and to services.