[Relevant documents: Correspondence from the Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts to the Comptroller and Auditor General, on Government compensation and financial redress schemes, reported to the House on 29 January 2024.]
That this House recognises the challenges faced by individuals and businesses in accessing effective dispute resolution and obtaining redress in cases of injustice; believes that the Government needs to address these specific challenges, namely a fragmented and inconsistent redress landscape; considers statutory guidance to be an essential measure to ensure compensation and redress schemes follow common principles and lead to fair and independent outcomes; and calls on the Government to create statutory guidance with common principles for setting up and operating a redress scheme.
It is my honour to move the motion that stands in my name and that of the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg). I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate. I also thank the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), for her recent correspondence with the Comptroller and Auditor General, calling on public bodies to have redress schemes that are effective, timely, proportionate and fair.
Samuel Beckett famously wrote:
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
What if we learned nothing from our previous failure? What if we simply failed, failed again and approached the failure as in the past, only to fail a bit differently and with many of the same mistakes as before? That is the situation we face with compensation and redress following scandals.
I imagine that every Member of this House will have received correspondence from a constituent who has been failed and treated unfairly in the wake of a scandal. Rather than being able to access swift and fair redress, they have instead been subjected to further hardship, delays and unfair treatment. Sometimes that mistreatment can be as devastating as the pain caused initially by the scandal. There has rightly been significant attention nationally in recent months on the Post Office Horizon scandal, and in particular on the various schemes set up to provide redress to the victims of what was the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
A sub-postmaster of a post office in my constituency was one of the hundreds wrongful convicted. Janine Powell was wrongfully accused of stealing £74,000 from her post office branch in Tiverton. She was subsequently sacked and arrested, before being convicted at a trial in Exeter in 2008. She described feeling “confused; dismayed; numb”. That is because Ms Powell was sentenced to 18 months in prison, serving five months. She was sent to prison just two days after her daughter’s 10th birthday. She said that the hardest part of her wrongful imprisonment was leaving her children. She said:
“I’ve missed out on doing things with them—I can’t get that back.”
No amount of money could ever make up for what happened to Ms Powell, but compensation can at least try to make up for some of the loss they faced. Sadly, the various Post Office compensation schemes that have existed have failed to provide swift and fair redress, as I know from another constituent case that I am dealing with.
According to the law firm Howe and Co, which represents 150 sub-postmasters, the compensation scheme
“continues to be exceptionally slow…and refuses to entertain applications from persons who are plainly entitled to apply”.
This afternoon, I hope to outline that the Post Office case is but one example of a wider problem. No guidance exists on when and how compensation schemes should be established or what an overseeing body should look like. That means that each scheme has its own unique and dysfunctional set of rules. Reinventing the wheel each time a scandal emerges means that victims are failed by the very system that is meant to right the wrongs of the past.
The hon. and gallant Member is making an important point about how we seem to have unique circumstances in trying to overcome some of these issues. For example, the sodium valproate issue was raised through Baroness Cumberlege’s “First Do No Harm” report. As with the infected blood scandal and the Horizon scandal, it has been outlined time after time that redress should be forthcoming. However, the Government again seem to be dragging their feet. Why does he think that would be?
The hon. Member is exactly right to draw a thread between several of these scandals. That is partly because when a new scandal emerges, the organisation responsible is often the organisation charged with redress. Andrew Bailey, while chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, said in 2017 that
“it just does not seem to be sensible that, every time one of these things happens, we have to set up something new.”
Beyond the Post Office schemes, we have heard criticism both here and in the press on the infected blood inquiry, as the hon. Member mentioned, and Windrush. That criticism has pointed to intolerable delays or the problematic features that often let the offending firm or institution off the hook.
I am interested to develop my hon. Friend’s thought about the Financial Conduct Authority. If I am able, I will speak at greater length about it later in the debate. It administers the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which is a fund set up by levies on financial services companies themselves. It is the maladministration of the FCA or a lack of proper regulation that often leads to these claims being brought. Essentially, the people paying for the scheme have to do so because of the incompetence of the FCA.
My right hon. Friend is exactly right. The FCA is not directly accountable to Parliament, but is accountable to Parliament through the Treasury. I, too, have had constituents finding themselves in a David and Goliath scenario, trying to tackle issues of unfairness with the FCA.
Likewise, in finance, we have seen the mis-selling of interest rate hedging products and widespread financial misconduct against small and medium-sized enterprises by the Royal Bank of Scotland, for example. Last year, the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking conducted the first systematic review of compensation schemes in the UK and found flaws common to several of them. Schemes are frequently blighted by unnecessary complexity, delays and a huge emotional and legal burden on victims. Often schemes are shrouded in secrecy and lack proper independence.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
I am listening to the hon. Gentleman’s speech carefully, and he is making some excellent points. Will he join me in deploring the methods by which organisations avoid their responsibilities to many of our constituents? For example, the business of my constituent George Dosoo, LD Partnership, took on a loan from RBS, now NatWest. In 2012, he discovered that a sum of £150,000 was removed without authority from the partnership account. Despite George obtaining recent legal opinion indicating that his case has merit, NatWest maintains that the case is time-barred and will not reopen it. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that time-barring is another device that is far too often used by businesses and institutions to deliberately undermine our constituents’ ability to obtain recourse?
The hon. Member is right about time-barring. I have a similar case with a constituent of mine, which might chime with hers. Nigel Cairns is trapped in what he describes as a
“complete nightmare scenario, with no way of escape”
after egregious misconduct by a bank. In 2007, Nigel took out a loan of £350,000 from HSBC. He had his house demolished in readiness to rebuild. In preparation for the work, the bank declared the termination and return of the loan. That was in 2007, when the financial crisis was very much with us. The bank subsequently agreed to reinstate the loan, but altered some of the terms and conditions so that the interest rate became double what Nigel had originally agreed to. After 10 years of repayments, the bank declared that unless he could sell the property or repay the loan, it would have to foreclose on him. The Financial Ombudsman Service refused to look into the matter initially and subsequently Mr Cairns received only £1,500 for the stress and anxiety of the case.
The APPG’s review, looking across 12 compensation schemes, found that over the past 20 years, the number of people affected amounted to a little over 78,000 people. When we consider some of the harrowing cases we are describing today, that number is thankfully quite small, but it says to us that it is a small enough number that these people could have timely redress and compensation, if only we had a body that could sort it out. That brings me on to another example: infected blood. During business questions this morning, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), as she always does on a Thursday, drove home on behalf of her constituents the need to compensate promptly those people affected by the infected blood scandal. In the last 24 hours, we have heard of a proposed Government amendment to the Victims and Prisoners Bill to try to bring about compensation. I completely agree with the right hon. Member that by not setting a deadline for that compensation, we allow this issue to run and run. In the other place, the Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Brinton sought to take that up with the Government, and proposed an amendment that was much more vigorous in setting a timeframe for compensation, but the Government chose not to adopt it.
On the composition of the Foskett panel and the huge delays in the compensation due to those defrauded in the HBOS scandal, there have been allegations that Lloyds bank had a big part in deciding who was appointed to the panel. Would that not explain the delays, and why people are not being paid the compensation that they believe they deserve?
The hon. Member is right that in redress schemes, the perpetrator of the injustice is often charged with trying to put it right. Of course, the perpetrator has a vested interest—indeed, it is not even vested; it is just an interest—in trying to pay out as little as possible, and in accepting as little culpability as it can.
Does the hon. Member agree that many victims are annoyed by the way that these schemes become a feeding frenzy for lawyers, who in many cases are the only people who ultimately benefit? What really sticks in the throat of many victims is that many lawyers may be getting more out of the schemes than the individuals affected.
I am grateful to the right hon. Member for his intervention. Probably nobody in this place knows more about the Horizon compensation schemes than he does. Lee Castleton, one of the sub-postmasters affected by the scandal, said that during the past 25 years,
“£135 million has been paid to some of the victims, but we’ve had £150 million plus paid to lawyers.”
We need a set of underlying principles. We need: a collaborative approach and process; timeliness; independence; recognition of adversity; transparency; broader eligibility; greater accessibility and legal costs; a clear appeals mechanism; and, finally, fairness and efficiency.
The hon. and gallant Member is kind in giving way. Moving back to the sodium valproate scandal, we keep saying that justice delayed is justice denied, but in that case, it is not only children but grandchildren who are impacted, because it looks as though the effects of sodium valproate disorder are being passed on to grandchildren as well. Schemes need to be not only fair but pragmatic, so that once compensation is delivered, they can still be open to claims. I say that thinking of the further after-effects of one of the biggest scandals in the health service since thalidomide.
The hon. Member is exactly right about how younger generations can be affected. We have recently seen attempts by some Horizon victims, and indeed children of victims, to seek compensation. The tragedy of his point about justice delayed being justice denied is that older victims of these scandals are dying before they see that justice, and before enjoying any of the compensation that they deserved.
I set out nine underlying principles that would establish a common-sense bedrock for a compensation scheme. To deliver those principles for fair redress and to guarantee independent oversight, we need an arm’s length body to design and adjudicate the schemes. The existing voluntary mechanisms for redress are far too fragmented. We need a standing, independent body that can provide consistency for victims of scandals—no matter the sector—which can be activated whenever a new scandal emerges. It should be constituted of experts, so that it guarantees independence of judgment, and should be accountable directly to Parliament for the expenditure of any public funds and for its overall conduct. Critically, victims must also have representation on the panels.
The structure would come at no extra cost to the taxpayer, as the current compensation framework often proves lengthy and costly for both victim and taxpayer. Taken together, the nine UK redress schemes—whether active or completed—studied by the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking have cost at least £3.7 billion. That figure covers not only the amount of compensation that has gone to victims, but, as we have discussed, the fees to solicitors, accountants and firms that have engaged to undertake reviews—and indeed firms that are reviewing reviews. More often than not, victims are left feeling cheated. They eventually cling on to some sort of late, inadequate consolation of redress and compensation. In the case of the Post Office, many of the 555 sub-postmasters who were exposed to the scandal have still received little compensation, because most of the money was swallowed up.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord), and I am grateful to him for introducing this important subject. I am sorry that it has not attracted more attention from hon. Members on both sides of the House.
How often have we said, “There is nothing new under sun”? I will start my remarks by referring to August 1975. Tanya Price had a whooping cough vaccine at the age of six months. Shortly after, she developed convulsions, and 18 months later, she was described as a “motionless and expressionless being” in a debate in this House by her MP, the late Robert Adley, who was my predecessor but one as MP for Christchurch, although at that time the constituency was Christchurch and Lymington. Robert Adley worked tirelessly for months to try to obtain redress from the health service for Tanya’s injuries, which were caused by the whooping cough vaccine.
That was 48 years ago, under a Labour Government, but little has changed in the Government’s institutional reluctance to admit to medical failures and institute redress schemes. Robert Adley described fighting Tanya’s battle as fighting the NHS, which he described as being like
“sparring with a giant octopus.”
That was all those years ago, but I do not see that the situation has changed. In his Adjournment debate in the House of Commons on 22 March 1977, Robert Adley said:
“This fight has been going on for a long time. Certainly in the last four years a group of parents have sought to get what they see as justice for their children but they have had precious little satisfaction. The battle is in many ways a repetition of the thalidomide debate…The result is decaying confidence in all the immunisation programmes. It represents a flirtation with tragedy, particularly when most of the other vaccines appear to be safe, harmless and have little or no disadvantageous side effects.”
It is about power, is it not? As the hon. Gentleman rightly says, the individual does not have the financial means or expertise to take forward those cases against either a corporation or a Government. In the Post Office scandal, the Post Office spent £100 million of our public money defending a case that they knew they would not win, because they were trying to stop the truth coming out and to bankrupt and stop the individuals from concluding the case.
That is right. These are deep-seated institutional failures. This is not a party political issue, but one that affects everyone in this country. This House is unable to persuade Governments and the officials serving them to get real about what many people are suffering as a result of the delays. It seems as though the Government’s policy, perhaps led by the Treasury, is always to postpone the inevitable. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton referred to the contaminated blood scandal. I find it unacceptable that those people whose cases have been established as deserving proper compensation are still waiting. There are similar cases in the Post Office scandal, as the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) said, and in the sodium valproate case, which has given rise to huge reports, which I hope briefly to come to later.
Going back to the issue with which I am primarily concerned, because I chair the all-party parliamentary group on covid-19 vaccine damage, there are now getting on for 10,000 claims under the scheme. Almost half are yet to be dealt with, so people are waiting for their claims to be resolved. Under the system that operates, if their claim is rejected by the independent panel, they have the right to have their case reviewed. That process itself generates further delays, sometimes in excess of a year. Meanwhile, there is a three-year limitation on being able to bring civil actions from the time the cause of the civil action arose.
I raised this issue with the Prime Minister in a private meeting and at Prime Minister’s questions a few weeks ago. I am pleased to say that, following that, I have a meeting set up with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care next week. But I will not hold my breath, because I just do not see any willingness on the part of officialdom, even if there was willingness on the part of Ministers, to address these outrageous injustices. It goes to the heart of trust in public service and in Government if people cannot trust the Government to do the right thing. If they take the vaccine and it turns out to have been very bad for their health, the deal should be—it always used to be—that the Government look after them and see them right, but that is not what is happening. Instead, those people are being put through the ringer, and enormous amounts of bureaucracy and time are being wasted, and to very little effect—except that the Treasury can probably say, “Well, we can’t actually guarantee that we will have to spend this amount of money now.”
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I have a constituent whose friend who has been affected by the infected blood scandal. Some of the tales that she has passed on are really harrowing. Her friend said:
“In my 20s I was planning my funeral and feeling like I was contaminated and filthy. I met and married someone prepared to date a woman with poisoned blood.”
She speaks of how it caused a
“host of long-term devastating side effects”.
She continued:
“I lost my career as an IT consultant, it made me infertile so I have been unable to have a family, and we had we had to stop IVF and surrogacy attempts because I became too ill to be a parent. I’ve had brain, body, psychological and emotional impacts from this virus. And then decades of exhausted fighting for an evasive and oft-denied justice, which caused its own damage, including most recently the end of my marriage.”
Such people deserve to be compensated promptly. They do not need the stress and worry of a scheme that always seems to roll out into the future, and of having to fight at every turn.
Mass redress schemes are set up on an ad hoc basis. They are voluntary, and established to tackle a specific scandal, following failure of a given organisation’s internal complaints procedures. How do we ensure that the victims of our largest and most damaging scandals, and any unfortunate future victims, are protected from unfair treatment and appropriately compensated? We need the framework for redress to be improved to ensure that we do not make the same mistakes again. This debate is a call to action for Ministers. The Government must establish a clear framework based on best practice.
The HBOS Reading compensation scheme is another example. In 2017, after 15 years, six individuals were sentenced to a cumulative 47 years in prison for their role in a fraud that left its victims, in the words of the sentencing judge, “cheated, defeated and penniless”. Eight years on, we have had more than two years of the discredited Griggs review, and a further two years reviewing the review and coming up with new recommendations. We are now in the fourth year of the Foskett panel. We would think that by now that we would have got it right, but all the perpetrators of the crime are out of prison, the victims have yet to be compensated, and serious questions remain about the panel.
There is a set of underlying principles that would establish a common-sense bedrock for any compensation scheme and how it should be built.
We need lessons to be learned from the array of scandals that I have set out. I am curious to hear what the Minister has to say about the proposal for an arm’s length body to deal with situations of the kind that I and right hon. and hon. Members have described.
He rightly severely criticised
“the position adopted by the Secretary of State in his refusal to consider compensation, and until…recently, his refusal…at least…to discuss the problem openly”.—[Official Report, 22 March 1977; Vol. 928, c. 1244.]
It would be wonderful to say that things have moved on. One of the consequences of the thalidomide scandal was the setting up of the royal commission headed by Lord Pearson, which took some five years to report, eventually doing so in 1978. It was set up following the Robens Committee on Safety and Health at Work, and in the light of concern about thalidomide. When the Pearson report was published, it was welcomed by the then Prime Minister as a comprehensive review. It was designed to remove unnecessary litigation, time delays and all the rest when getting redress for people who had suffered medical injuries induced by vaccines or other drugs. Paragraph 1,398—it was a long report—recommended the following:
“We concluded that there is a special case for paying compensation for vaccine damage where vaccination is recommended by a public authority and is undertaken to protect the community. We had reached this conclusion when we were asked by the Government for our views.”
The Pearson Committee also recommended strict liability for vaccine damage.
Sadly, those recommendations were not implemented, although we did get the vaccine damage payments legislation of 1979. I have been campaigning to get that legislation brought up to date, so that it is relevant to the circumstances of all those who have suffered loss and damage as a result of doing the right thing and taking their covid-19 vaccine. It has been an uphill struggle. The most recent information I have is that there are so many applications under the vaccine damage payment scheme that the Government cannot cope. In three years, only 163 out of more than 9,000 claims have been successful—those were the figures as at 31 January. Of those claims, 4,000 were still awaiting a resolution; 2,000 have been outstanding for more than six months, and some for more than 18 months. That is directly damaging to all those people who are thinking of engaging in civil claims, which the Government keep advising victims to do.
Making a civil claim against a large multinational pharmaceutical company—or the Government, for that matter—is an expensive business. I have a constituent whose father has the £120,000 compensation, but for whom that is wholly inadequate because of the severity and longevity of the injuries and disabilities that he sustained as a result of the vaccine. He is finding it nigh on impossible to get access to justice, because solicitors will not take up his calls. Even starting an action will cost tens of thousands of pounds. That is an intolerable situation, and one which, all those years ago, Lord Pearson was trying to avoid.
The Government’s feeble response is, “If you think you’ve been injured by a vaccine, go and seek compensation through the courts.” It does not work quite like that, as sadly has been seen by all those people whose cases it has already been established were caused by vaccines. One would think that if the vaccine damage payment scheme has established that an individual’s damage was caused by the vaccine, as night follows day, the Government would concede liability in a civil action. Far from it; they insist that individuals must fight the case before the courts.
Years ago, when I was a shadow Treasury Minister, I looked at the issues arising from the Equitable Life scandal. That was a failure by the Treasury’s own team of regulators to protect investors in pension schemes under Equitable Life. At one stage they were thought to be as good as investing in the Consolidated Fund. You may remember, Mr Deputy Speaker, that everybody was joining in having Equitable Life pensions. Well, the regulator was asleep on the job. The ombudsman found that that was the situation and ordered compensation. The Government refused compensation and said that they would make ex-gratia payments. As is the case today, we know that much of the money that was eventually set aside has not yet been delivered to the victims of the Equitable Life scandal, and that the Treasury is refusing to distribute the money, saying “Well, that is basically a win for the Treasury.” Is it surprising that confidence in our institutions and in government—with a small “g”—is rapidly diminishing?
Today’s debate is of fundamental importance. I hope that the Cabinet Minister, when he responds, will come up with some specific proposals on what will be done in relation to all the individual cases that will be referred to in this debate, as well as dealing with the deep-seated institutional problems to which I have referred. The Minister without Portfolio, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Esther McVey), with whom I have previously raised this matter in Cabinet Office questions, and who at one stage I thought would respond to this debate, is charged with ensuring that we address the issue of the time bar on covid-19 vaccine damage claims. I would be very grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister if, when he responds to the debate, he can give us some positive news on that point, even if not on many others.
The covid vaccine damage payment scheme is not a strict liability scheme, and it is not even a compensation scheme, but it is better than nothing. Why is it, however, that the £120,000 maximum payment under the scheme has not been updated since 2007? It would now be about £200,000 if updated. Why are we updating everything else in line with inflation, but not the vaccine damage payment scheme for people for whom taking a vaccine was disastrous? Again, we cannot get any answers out of the Treasury or the Government. Sometimes there are expressions of sympathy, but they are not much use. What we want is action. What justification can there be for eroding the value of vaccine damage payments to the extent that I have referred to?
The Cumberlege report, “Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review”, was set up in 2018 in response to concerns about the Primodos hormone pregnancy test, the use of sodium valproate in pregnancy and vaginal mesh. The review, which was led by Baroness Cumberlege, published its report in July 2020. It made a number of serious and compelling recommendations, including the establishment of an independent redress agency. If the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton, who introduced the debate, thinks that the Government are going to respond positively to the suggestions he put forward, I just ask him to look at the record. That was an ex-Conservative Health Minister making a clear recommendation, on page 11, to set up an independent redress agency:
“A new independent Redress Agency for those harmed by medicines and medical devices should be created based on models operating effectively in other countries. The Redress Agency will administer decisions using a non-adversarial process with determinations based on avoidable harm looking at systemic failings, rather than blaming individuals.”
How long did it take for the Government to respond to that report? They published their response not in 2020 but in July 2021, exactly one year later, which fits the pattern we are discussing. It took them a year to respond to the report and they cursorily rejected its recommendation for a new redress agency, stating:
“We do not accept this recommendation. We do not believe that a redress agency would make products safer and support our commitment to patient safety. We also believe it is already possible for government and others to provide redress where this is considered necessary, the government therefore has no plans to establish an independent redress agency.”
It took the Government a year to prepare that wording and explanation. All one can do, really, is despair. There is an opportunity today for the Minister to say, “Well, that was all under a previous Government. Now we have a new Government and they will accept all the recommendations of the Cumberlege report.”
The Cumberlege report also recommended that discretionary schemes should be established for sodium valproate, hormone pregnancy tests and pelvic mesh. That would
“provide discretionary payments for the costs of additional needs”
caused by the harms associated with those products. The Government response also rejected that recommendation, noting:
“Patients have the right to take healthcare providers to court for clinical negligence, or manufacturers to court for product liability.”
It further explains on page 23:
“While the government is sympathetic to the experiences of those patients who gave evidence to the report, our primary focus is on improving future medicines and medical devices safety. It is therefore crucial that we focus government funds on initiatives that directly improve future safety (including specialist mesh centres and support for families affected by medicines in pregnancy). For this reason, redress schemes will not be established in response to recommendation 4.”
That was the situation in relation to the hapless individuals who were at the wrong end of that particular NHS procedure. More recently, and before we have got as far as any inquiries into it, we have been faced with the prospect of having to deal with the scandal of all those young people who are living with the consequences of being given puberty blockers at the behest, if not the recommendation, of the NHS. When Sir Chris Whitty was asked about that on the radio earlier this week, he seemed totally unapologetic, almost to the point of diffidence, although he was insistent that we should do something about people who were engaging in smoking tobacco or vapes. So another compensation issue will arise in relation to all those people who were persuaded by the NHS to do the wrong thing.
One recommendation that did come out of the Cumberlege review was for the establishment of—this sounded really great—a patient safety commissioner for England. When, in my capacity as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on covid-19 vaccine damage, I approached Dr Hughes and asked whether she would take up the case of the victims of covid-19 vaccines, she was very sympathetic, but said—and this comes back to the issue of the culture—that she had only the equivalent of one man and a dog in her department. She was being starved of the resources that would enable her to fulfil the remit that she had been given by the Government, which, again, was absolutely intolerable. She explained that she did not have time to deal with the vaccine damage issue because, perfectly reasonably, she was concentrating on sodium valproate and pelvic mesh. On 7 February this year she published her report setting out further recommendations for redress in relation to those matters, including a recommendation for the creation of an independent redress scheme to provide both financial and non-financial redress. The Government have not yet responded to that report; perhaps the Minister will respond to it today. In February, in response to a parliamentary question, the Health Minister responsible said:
“The Government is now carefully considering the… recommendations, and will respond substantively in due course.”
That is just not good enough, especially as the Government seem to be relying on some very feeble initiatives to which they have drawn attention.
There is now—this is exciting news, Madam Deputy Speaker—a new risk acknowledgment form to be completed by those for whom valproate is prescribed. There is also a “claims gateway” on the NHS Resolution website for those wishing to embark on clinical negligence claims. The Hughes report criticises these arrangements, and criticises the “claims gateway” description because there is no new legal framework to enable people to engage in litigation and no guarantee of help with legal aid. We hear that a child who challenged the decision by a north London comprehensive in relation to the wearing of religious symbols received legal aid money amounting to £150,000. How was that possible, when people who want redress because they have been done down by the national health service do not get anything at all?
In the foreword to her report, Dr Hughes says
“the case for redress had already been made by the First Do No Harm review so my report would primarily focus on ‘how’ to provide redress rather than ‘why’.”
I hope that, in his response today, the Minister will accept that the Government should now focus on how to provide redress rather than why redress is needed. In her foreword, Dr Hughes also says:
“All those we spoke to have approached this process with openness and goodwill despite the considerable challenges they face. As time progresses, these challenges intensify and, understandably, there is now a growing sense of frustration and anger among patients. Confidence in the government to do the right thing is eroding.
Over the years, while these patients have been suffering, I have seen other healthcare scandals in this country rightly receive recognition and redress, from thalidomide to vCJD and, most recently, the infected blood scandal. Fairness demands that those harmed by valproate and pelvic mesh receive the recognition and redress to meet their needs.”
If the Government agree with that, why do they not say so now? Why are they continuing to kick the can down the road and deny people access to the compensation that they rightfully deserve?
I have spoken for longer than I expected, Madam Deputy Speaker, but, as I have said, there is a long history to this. I hope it will not be another 48 years before another Member of Parliament for Christchurch stands up and says, “48 years ago, a former Member for Christchurch was arguing this very point in the House.” Let us learn from history. Let us not be complacent; let us get angry for action.