Rishi Sunak heckled at infected blood inquiry as he defends government response

Rishi Sunak was heckled at the infected blood inquiry as he defended the lack of a compensation scheme for victims and family members affected by the scandal.

The prime minister faced questions on Wednesday about why a scheme has not been set up despite recommendations from the paymaster general in 2020, a government-commissioned report last year and Sir Brian Langstaff, the inquiry’s chair in April.

Jenni Richards KC said to Sunak: “Over 16 months since Sir Robert Francis’s compensation framework study was delivered to the government and now over three months since the … second interim report [by the inquiry chair] recommending compensation on the basis of wrongs done at individual, collective and systemic levels and the people whose lives were torn apart by those wrongs still have no idea of the shape, the form, the scope of any compensation scheme or of timescale.

“Now against that background, that overarching chronology – and I’m going to invite you to give a yes or no answer to this question: is that good enough, in terms of the government’s response?”

In response, Sunak said his government was the first to accept the “moral obligation” for compensation for the “appalling scandal” and had made interim payments of £100,000 – as recommended by Francis – to 4,500 people but it was right to wait until the inquiry’s final report before setting up a compensation network.

When Richards asked once again whether the government’s response was good enough there were heckles and a shout of “you don’t listen” from the audience, which included hundreds of people infected and affected by the scandal, gathered at 8 Northumberland Avenue hotel, near Whitehall.

There were jeers again when Sunak was asked whether options for a compensation framework were in place and ready to be implemented when the inquiry’s final report is published and the prime minister said work continued “at pace”.

Experts estimate that about 2,900 deaths from 1970 to 2019 in the UK were attributable to the scandal, which has been described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS. They were infected after being given factor VIII blood products that were contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C imported from the US in the 1970s and 80s, or after being exposed to tainted blood through transfusions or after childbirth.

Langstaff said in his interim report in April that there was a need for a compensation scheme to be set up as soon as possible as “delay often defeats injustice”, words almost identical to those used by the then-paymaster general Penny Mordaunt in a 2020 letter.

Questioned about Langstaff’s recommendation that a scheme be set up now and begin work by the end of the year, Sunak replied: “What I don’t want to do is add to what I believe to be a litany of broken promises and dashed expectations of everyone in this room and everyone watching has had to endure for years if not decades.”

Richards said there were fears that the government’s position of waiting for the final inquiry report was an excuse for delay, adding at that point the inquiry would no longer have powers.

She asked Sunak whether the government would consider changing its mind about waiting but the prime minister replied that it would be inappropriate to speculate about a change of government policy during the hearing.

Richards also read out moving testimony from parents who had lost children from infected blood and pushed Sunak on why Langstaff’s recommendation that bereaved parents and children receive interim compensation payments had not been acted upon. In response, Sunak again declined to speculate as it was “subject to ongoing government decision-making and policymaking”.