The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will come under pressure to stay true to his word and sign off on immediate compensation payments totalling up to £10bn to victims of the contaminated blood scandal when the long-awaited final report on the affair is published on Monday.
The scandal is described as the worst treatment disaster in NHS history, with more than 3,000 people having died as a result of receiving contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. It is estimated that, even today, a person infected during the scandal dies every four days.
When Hunt was chair of the all-party health select committee in 2022, before becoming chancellor, he urged ministers “to recognise that time is of the essence” and to pay up immediately before more people died. A year later, as chancellor, he told the public inquiry that the bill for compensation could end up costing “very, very large sums of money”. Now, as he tries to find enough headroom to deliver more pre-election tax cuts, a £10bn bill could blow a hole in his calculations.
On Monday, after endless government delays, Labour will demand that compensation payments to victims be made in full and immediately, rather than being stalled further and left until after a general election, which Keir Starmer’s party is favourite to win.
The inquiry’s final report will be published on Monday by Sir Brian Langstaff. It will detail how more than 30,000 haemophiliacs or transfusion recipients were 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 issue an apology 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 final compensation scheme. They should wait no longer.”
As far back as July 2022, Langstaff called for the victims and their families to be paid “without delay”, saying infected people and bereaved partners should be given “payments of no less than £100,000”.
Labour MP Diana Johnson, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on haemophilia and contaminated blood, who has campaigned for justice for victims, said: “Government has had the compensation recommendations from the public inquiry for over a year and no more time must be wasted.
“Compensation should be paid as quickly as possible by this government. We cannot wait for any future government to do the right thing, when we know one person still dies on average every three and a half days from the scandal.
“The fact that the government has failed to make further interim payments to children who lost parents and parents who lost children, as Sir Brian recommended in April 2023, is one measure that this government needs to implement without any further delay.”
Former health secretary Andy Burnham, who recently won a third term as mayor of Greater Manchester, said the infected blood scandal had highlighted a “rotten culture” in Whitehall that had to change. For decades, he said, civil servants had “lined up behind the line that no one was knowingly given 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 stemmed from the Treasury having insisted from early on that nothing must be said or done that might lead to the government having to accept liability. There were echoes, Burnham said, of the Hillsborough disaster and the Post Office scandal. “It is deeply unethical what they do. They deny the reality. They leave people in the wilderness.”
Full compensation had to be paid out immediately, he said. “Anything else would be reprehensible and immoral.”
