Infected Blood Inquiry: Government Response

Debate between Baroness Meacher and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

That is a question for many previous Governments. I can speculate, as can the noble Lord, but this Government have accepted the moral case. That has implications, and we have made interim payments. This is not a difficult matter; I always go back to the need to give the victims the justice they deserve and our intention to do that.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

The Government’s Statement on their response to the Infected Blood Inquiry is a deep disappointment—that is an understatement. The Commons Minister said, and our Minister repeated it—I in no way criticise our Minister for this; I respect her greatly—that the

“distress and trauma that each individual has faced as a result of this tragedy is unimaginable”.

Yet the Minister went on to do absolutely nothing about it, other than establish a psychological service 40 years on. In my view, all this does is recognise the extraordinary depth of the damage done to these people—nothing more.

The Government have had the full and final recommendations on compensation and redress from the inquiry since April 2023, when it said that the compensation scheme should be set up and work should begin in 2023—of course, the Government ignored this. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, mentioned the Government appointing legal and clinical experts to advise them further on the operation of the compensation scheme, when the inquiry made it very clear that the chair of the arm’s-length body should make those appointments.

As president of the Haemophilia Society, I remind the House of the sheer numbers of people affected in this appalling way by those administrative errors. Over 5,000 people with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders were treated with contaminated blood products brought over from the United States that were taken from prisoners, drug addicts and others. This is a shocking history, and it is surely time that all those directly or indirectly affected should be compensated fully and immediately.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I am sorry for the disappointment that the noble Baroness found it necessary to express. I cannot help sharing it, to some extent. I thank her for reminding us of the numbers involved, which may be even more than she talked about. We do not exactly know, which is one of reasons why we are not in a position to do the necessary moving forward.

I reiterate the point made on previous occasions when we have discussed this: the lack of a timetable is very worrying to us all. As I explained, we will have a firm date for the final report very shortly, by 17 January. We expect the report in March, and within 25 sitting days we will provide a proper response to Parliament, with an Oral Statement on next steps. We have to move forward, as well as being disappointed and complaining about the slowness of this. This is a major scandal and we are, as a Government, trying to move forward and sort it out.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Baroness Meacher and Baroness Neville-Rolfe

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I hope your Lordships will forgive me. I have put my name down to the Clause 1 stand part debate and various other things, but I have a family crisis and I have to go. I just want to make a few brief points a little out of sync.

My noble friend Lady O’Neill—a highly intelligent woman—just said to me that this is the most chaotic debate she has ever heard in this House. This House is being expected to have a serious debate on individual amendments that are terribly important: seat belts for kids, aviation and so on. The problem with the Bill—as pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, whom I support 100% in what he said—is that there is nothing in it. There is no information in it. There is a wholesale sunset clause and wholesale referral for Ministers to decide what to retain, what to reform and, if so, how, and what to do with each and every policy area covered by this enormous Bill. As for the idea that Clause 1 should stand part, it seems fairly obvious to me that you cannot just sunset all this at the end of the year, but that clause makes way for Clause 15, where the wholesale referral of all matters to Ministers is set down.

I have appealed, and I will just say it once more, and I will not say it again, I promise—forgive me, your Lordships—that I hope the Government will have the self-respect to withdraw the Bill, go away and do the work that needs doing, because an enormous amount of work needs to be done, and then bring back a Bill which can be debated by Parliament. I just want to make again the constitutional point: Ministers have consistently said, during the passage of the Bill in 2018, the memorandum to this Bill and so on, that the purpose of this Bill and what became the 2018 Act was to shift policy-making power from the EU to the UK Parliament, to make the UK Parliament central to our policy-making. The Government have not done what they say they want to do; they have transferred all power to Ministers. I therefore appeal to Ministers to do what they apparently want to do. I do not expect the Labour Party to intervene on this: I feel this is a matter for the Government, and I just say, “Please, Government, do what I think you all know you need to do”.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I think the noble Baronesses for their interventions and understand their depth of feeling. I should explain that this is a framework Bill, and it has been presented as such. The regulatory process will be gone through, and this House will then get a chance to look at the SIs.