Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the evidential basis was for the elimination in the uplift of annual payments in 2018-19 for patients suffering from stage 2 hepatitis C who were contaminated with infected blood.

The Department’s consultation ‘Infected Blood – Consultation on Special Category Mechanism and financial and other support in England’ set out plans for further support measures for all those affected by the infected blood tragedy. As it set out in the Consultation document, we are proposing to remove a fixed uplift in annual payments from 2018/19 onward for all eligible recipients, in order to ensure that the scheme, overall, remains within the allocated budget while introducing the Special Category Mechanism, which will benefit a significant proportion of stage 1 beneficiaries, offering them annual payments equivalent to those received by beneficiaries with hepatitis C stage 2 disease or those infected with HIV.

We believe this is a fair and reasonable distribution of the available funding, and necessary in order to preserve levels of support provided to beneficiaries including through the discretionary fund, which we know is valued by beneficiaries and their families.

Further detail on the evidential basis for this specific proposal and others is available in the Impact Assessment that accompanied the Consultation.