The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will come under pressure to stay true to his word and sign off on immediate compensation payments totaling up to £10 billion to the victims of the tainted blood scandal, when the long-awaited final report into the affair is published.
The scandal has been described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS, with more than 3,000 people dying in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of receiving contaminated blood products. It is estimated that even today, a person infected during the scandal dies every four days.
When Hunt chaired the all-party health committee in 2022, before becoming chancellor, he urged ministers to “recognize that time is of the essence” and pay immediately before more people died. A year later, as chancellor, he told the public inquiry that the compensation bill could cost “very, very large sums of money”. As he tries to find enough room to deliver more tax cuts before the election, a £10 billion bill could blow a hole in his calculations.
On Monday, after endless government delays, Labor will demand that compensation payments to victims be made in full and immediately, rather than waiting until after the general election, which Keir Starmer’s party is favorite to win.
The final report of the inquiry will be published by Sir Brian Langstaff on Monday. It will detail how more than 30,000 hemophiliacs or transfusion recipients became infected with HIV or hepatitis C over more than two decades, killing an estimated 2,900 people by the end of 2019.
Rishi Sunak is expected to apologize on behalf of successive governments in a House of Commons statement on Monday or Tuesday.
Labour’s Nick Thomas-Symonds, the shadow minister without portfolio, said: “Victims have waited far too long for a proper apology and a final compensation scheme. They shouldn’t wait any longer.”
As early as July 2022, Langstaff called for victims and their families to be paid “without delay”, saying infected people and surviving relatives should receive “payments of not less than £100,000”.
Labor MP Diana Johnson, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Haemophilia and Contaminated Blood, which has campaigned for justice for victims, said: “The government has had the compensation recommendations publicly available for more than a year investigation and there should be no more time to Be drunk.
“The compensation must be paid by this government as soon as possible. We cannot wait for a future government to do the right thing when we know that someone is still dying on average every three and a half days as a result of the scandal.
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“The government’s failure to make further interim payments to children who lost parents and parents who lost children, such as Sir Brian recommended in April 2023is a measure that this government must implement without further delay.”
Former Health Secretary Andy Burnham, who recently won a third term as mayor of Greater Manchester, said the contaminated blood scandal had exposed a “rotten culture” in Whitehall that needed to change. For decades, he said, officials “stood behind the line that no one had knowingly received unsafe blood,” despite clear warnings and evidence to the contrary. Burnham said he and other ministers had been repeatedly lied to by officials.
He suspects this stems from the fact that the Treasury Department insisted early on that nothing should be said or done that could cause the government to accept liability. There were echoes, Burnham said, of the Hillsborough disaster and the Post Office scandal. “What they are doing is very unethical. They deny reality. They leave people in the wilderness.”
Full compensation should be paid immediately, he said. “Anything else would be reprehensible and immoral.”