Infected Blood Inquiry: Additional Report

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent]

The noble Lord raises an incredibly important point. We live at a time when people do not want to trust our institutions and we have given people far too many reasons not to trust us. There is responsibility on every single one of us, both the Government and the Opposition, but also everyone who seeks to hold public office, to rebuild trust in every one of our institutions. I cannot imagine how it must be for the victims, especially for the families who had young children and who would immediately have trusted their doctors and their teachers, to have ended up in this place. Every touchstone of our society let them down, and it took us far too long as a country to accept what had happened to them. We have a duty to the people who were touched by this horrendous scandal to fix what was broken.

But the noble Lord is absolutely right that we also have a responsibility to wider society to demonstrate that the state is, can be and must be a force for good, that the state exists for a reason, that the establishment is not a bad word but a good word, and it can and should help communities up and down the country. So the noble Lord is absolutely right that the Government have committed to spend whatever it takes to fulfil our commitments in terms of compensation. We say many times in this building that we must learn from mistakes made, but we have to do more than learn; we have to act, and I hope that we will do so going forward.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, I do not doubt the sincerity of the Government in wanting to put right this situation as quickly as possible. In the Autumn Budget, £11.8 billion was set aside for that purpose, but as we have heard, the amounts that have so far been paid have been pitiful. Can the noble Baroness give the House any indication of how quickly the Government want to see that money go out? Unless there is real urgency, more and more people will continue to die without adequate compensation.

[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.