Families in UK contaminated blood scandal should be compensated, says judge

Parents and children of the victims of “the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS” should be compensated, the chair of the inquiry into the infected blood scandal has said.

Sir Brian Langstaff, a former judge, said he believed action was “necessary to alleviate immediate suffering” of those affected, noting that many were now “on borrowed time”.

During the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of people were infected with HIV and Hepatitis C after receiving tainted blood transfusions from the NHS.

About 1,350 people are thought to have contracted HIV, of whom around 1,000 had died by 2019, according to the inquiry. A further 26,800 had contracted Hepatitis C, of whom about 1,820 had died from causes related to the infection.

Langstaff issued his statement ahead of publication of his full report, and said he was “recommending further interim compensation payments to recognise the deaths of people who have so far gone unrecognised”.

Last July, he ruled that victims, or their bereaved partners, should each receive no less than £100,000 in compensation as quickly as possible, leading to payouts of about £400mn.

Suggesting that group of recipients now needed to be widened, he said that about 380 children with bleeding disorders had been infected with HIV, some of whom had died in childhood, but their parents had never received compensation. Nor had children who were orphaned as a result of infections transmitted by blood transfusions and blood products had their losses recognised, he added.

Langstaff, whose inquiry opened in 2018, described how victims had campaigned for decades to have their voices heard. “[Not only do the infections themselves and their consequences merit compensation, but so too do the wrongs done by authority, whose response served to compound people’s suffering.”

He quoted former health secretaries including Jeremy Hunt, now chancellor, who told the inquiry the failure of successive administrations to find a resolution represented “a failure of the British state”.

Langstaff added: “This has been described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS, and we have much to learn as a nation to help ensure that people never suffer in a similar way again.”

He noted that infection with Hepatitis B should be recognised as grounds for compensation, as with Hepatitis C and HIV. He also urged an end to an automatic cut-off date for eligibility for compensation, opening the possibility that people infected with Hepatitis C after September 1991 — when an effective test became available — may still qualify for compensation.

In addition, Langstaff said “specialist psychological support” should be available to people in England who had lost loved ones as it already was in the rest of the UK.

He added that a report by experts had concluded “the death of parents as a consequence of infected blood and blood products has significantly devastated a generation of children”.

Rachel Halford, chief executive of The Hepatitis C Trust, a charity, described the interim report as “a clear call to action for the government, which lays out the strong moral case for them to accept and compensate for the harm done to everyone affected by the contaminated blood scandal”. 

Jason Evans, director of Factor 8, an advocacy organisation, said compensation claims “must be able to be made as soon as possible with access to independent legal representation”.