Why Government's response to blood inquiry will be a litmus test for other inquiries - Ben Harrison

The Infected Blood Inquiry (IBI), one of the most far-reaching public inquiries in UK history, opened in autumn 2018 to investigate exactly what went wrong.

In our opening statement made on behalf of our, then, four clients, we questioned whether it had been criminal activity which led to them and their loved ones becoming infected with HIV and Hepatitis C.

Now, almost four years later and representing a tenfold number of clients, that question will still hang over our closing submissions.

Over the course of the last four years, IBI has heard and seen a vast amount of evidence which, putting criminality to one side for the moment, has clearly demonstrated a failure on the part of governments of all colours, over decades, to safeguard the health of haemophiliacs.

In the first half of the last century, it had become trite that large-pooling blood plasma was dangerous and inevitably led to hepatitis in the recipients; as a result, plasma pools were limited to 10 donations.

By 1973, and with apparent disregard for decades’ worth of received wisdom, the government approved medicine licenses for pooled plasma products derived from plasma pools stretching into thousands of donations.

The inevitable consequence is that every single person who received these products was infected with Hepatitis C; with the advent of AIDS, many were also infected with HIV.

A fight for justice began in the late 1980s by infected haemophiliacs and their families and has continued to this day.

Throughout, various governments have employed obfuscation and at times, blatant dishonesty – key documents have been destroyed or gone missing at critical points in time and whether occurring through design or incompetence, it appears to the outside observer as though there has been a cover-up.

That fight for justice has seen many false dawns but there is real hope that the careful, thorough, and objective way in which Sir Brian Langstaff has approached the whole scandal as the chairman of the IBI, will finally see the truth laid bare.

Last month, Sir Brian recommended that interim payments of not less than £100,000 should be made to all infected people and bereaved partners who are currently registered with the pre-existing support schemes.

This will provide a litmus test as to the type of reaction we can expect from the government to Sir Brian’s final report and recommendations.

The nature of any inquiry’s recommendations is that they are just that – recommendations, they are not orders which must be obeyed and government can choose whether or not to accept them.

The government’s lethargy in responding to the interim recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry illustrates the point perfectly and gives cause for caution amongst those representing the victims of the contaminated blood scandal.

The sad fact is that many of those victims do not have time on their side and those representing them must be prepared to take whatever legal action is necessary to achieve justice for them before it is too late.

Put more simply, if the government fails to act on the recommendations of Sir Brian, then legal proceedings will inevitably ensue.

A striking feature of many public inquiries is that they so often tend to come so very long after the event and so often tend to require decades worth of campaigning – we have seen this in our own work on both IBI and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

These campaigns re-traumatise and re-abuse those who are thrust into the role of campaigner.

It is no exaggeration to say that various governments have spent hundreds of millions of pounds in resisting the campaign mounted by haemophiliacs and their families.

It is nothing short of a tragedy that the government, in the late 1980s, did not sit down with the haemophilia community, explained what had gone wrong and why, and agreed to compensate them.

Had they done, not only would haemophiliacs and their families have been spared a 30-year fight, but the government would also have resolved the matter without creating such enormous ill-will. The time has now come for the matter to be settled once and for all.

Ben Harrison is head of public law at Milners Solicitors, which represented victims and families at the Infected Blood Inquiry.