Infected Blood Inquiry: Government Response

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, is taking part remotely. I invite him to ask his question.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, with an infected blood compensation bill of £11 billion-plus and a further annual bill of £3 billion for misdiagnosis and incorrect medication, and then recognising the limitations on Commons inquiries due to Member availability, limited expertise and agenda pressures, does not this whole affair now demand an ad hoc inquiry into compensation arrangements administration in the Lords, drawing on our huge expertise in accountancy, healthcare and wider issues of compensation law? I am sure our people could find ways of speeding up the process and the scheme, saving a lot of public money that is currently unnecessarily feeding some areas of the legal and other professions. I suspect this will all end up in a VFM report before the Public Accounts Committee in years to come.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

Noble Lords across your Lordships’ House have extraordinary expertise, and I will more than happily meet with any of them if they have recommendations for how we can more quickly expedite infected blood compensation payments. With regard to the £11.8 billion, though, that money has been ring-fenced in compensation payments for the victims of infected blood. We will do everything we can to make sure they get it. This is taxpayers’ money, so there is a balance here; we need to make sure that the people entitled to it get it, which is more straightforward for the infected; we will discuss in great detail what that means as we progress on to the affected, to make sure that safeguards are in place. But this money is for those people who have been directly affected, and we need to make sure that they are the ones with the money.