Infected Blood Inquiry: Additional Report

Baroness Sanderson of Welton Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent]

I would like it all out of the door today but, candidly, it will take longer than that. The noble Baroness is absolutely right: we pledged £11.8 billion in the Autumn Budget, and this week we announced another further £1 billion of costings. At the next Autumn Budget, we will confirm, after consultation with the community, how much the wider changes will cost; we assume it will be £1 billion, but that number is subject to ongoing consultation. We will expedite this as quickly as possible. With those in the infected community who are already subject to payment schemes, that is more straightforward. There is a wider challenge about the affected community, because obviously we do not know how many of them there are, and we always have to make sure that we are balancing protecting public funds while supporting those people who have been touched by this.

The only challenge from the noble Baroness on which I would slightly push back is that, in fact, £1.2 billion has already been distributed in interim payments, which is a significant amount of money, and £411 million—a much smaller sum—has been paid out so far to those people who have come forward to IBCA, as part of £602 million that has currently gone forward in offers. So, although the final settlements are a smaller figure, £1.2 billion been allocated.

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, quite rightly, the focus today is on the compensation scheme, but, as briefly discussed in his initial report, Sir Brian made a number of other recommendations. I will just say that I really welcome the dashboard. It is a brilliant thing, and I congratulate the Government on doing it. People will now be able to look at that, but can the Minister also assure us—and, more importantly, reassure the campaigners and those affected and infected—that all those other recommendations will be followed up and addressed in a timely manner? That is key to rebuilding trust, which has just been mentioned, but also because there is a slight worry that those other recommendations might get left behind and a little lost along the way.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent]

The noble Baroness makes an important point. Although it is vitally important that we focus on the victims and doing as much as we can to support them, more fundamental learnings also came through, so we are working our way through those and will continue to do so. The dashboard is incredibly important. One of the suggestions is that we should have a dashboard that covers every public inquiry; obviously, every public inquiry has different recommendations and different options, so at the moment this is the option going forward for us. It will be updated again in October; we have committed to quarterly updates, so that the people touched by this know exactly where we are and where we stand. I hope that that alone, if nothing else, will drive an ongoing commitment to deliver the rest of the recommendations.