Health Bill [HL]

At last, completion of the Bill’s Committee stage is at hand. For one dread moment, such was the heat generated by the debates on tobacco, I thought that we might all go up in smoke; but mercifully, due not least to the customary fortitude of my noble friend Lady Thornton, we have survived to address now the urgency of the needs of a small community of congenitally disabled people who, in the words from the scriptures, are living in sorrow and acquainted with grief. I have interests to declare, not pecuniary, as president of the Haemophilia Society and architect of the independent public inquiry, headed so admirably by my noble and learned friend Lord Archer, into NHS-supplied contaminated blood and blood products, some of whose recommendations could be implemented by acceptance of the new clause, either now or on Report, pending fuller debate and further action on its findings as a whole. I am most deeply grateful to my noble and learned friend and his colleagues in the inquiry team, Dr Norman Jones and Judith Willetts. Their report, exhaustively researched, is one also of excelling integrity and humane concern for arguably the most stricken minority in Britain today. I warmly acknowledge, too, the help of my noble friend Lord Turnberg who, as immediate past president of the of the Royal College of Physicians, served the inquiry with such skill and commitment until he and his wife Edna were so tragically bereaved. When I set up the inquiry two years ago, 1,757 haemophilia patients had already died from being infected by their NHS treatment with HIV and/or hepatitis C. The death toll has since risen by more than 200, and many more are left terminally ill by what my noble friend Lord Winston, vice-president of the Haemophilia Society, has described as the worst-ever treatment disaster in the history of the National Health Service. Yet the grievous death toll is not the whole story; the haemophilia community suffers privation at a depth that most other people can barely imagine. I had a letter yesterday from a friend of a haemophilia patient infected with hepatitis C, which described his plight. He is uninsured due to the prohibitive premiums imposed by insurers on people with his condition. He can no longer work full time and his income is in sharp decline. Travel and other costs are becoming too high for him to cope with, and a mortgage deal is out of the question. In the noble tradition of Good Samaritans, the man who wrote to me has himself been helping his friend financially, but now he, too, is facing the loss of full-time employment. This is but one example of the urgency of the need now for purposeful action on the Archer report, of which approval of this new clause would be a clear signal to the haemophilia community that at long last its plight has been recognised at Westminster and in Whitehall. For parliamentarians, there can be no higher duty than that of ensuring just treatment for those afflicted and bereaved by contaminated and life-threatening medication supplied by the state, and the emphatic backing of the report's recommendations by the mass media as a whole shows how clearly that duty is understood by the people of this country. It was just as clearly understood, too, by my right honourable friend Harriet Harman MP, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the House of Commons, when speaking on 5 March. Already having thanked my noble and learned friend Lord Archer, for his "important work", she told my honourable friend Dr Brian Iddon of her, ""congratulations to the campaigners"," on having, ""brought to the public’s attention the injustice that they have suffered"," from contaminated NHS blood and blood products. She also made it clear to the House of Commons that: ""The Government will respond shortly".—[Official Report, Commons, 5/3/09; cols. 993, 999.]" Thus the Haemophilia Society now looks forward to a positive response to the landmark report that she so fulsomely welcomed. There are two other issues to which I must briefly refer. The first is the sombre threat now of a third scourge facing the haemophilia community. I refer to the increasing number of haemophilia patients known by the Department of Health to have received blood from donors who subsequently died of vCJD, and the recently reported case of one hepatitis C-infected patient, a post mortem on whom revealed vCJD in his spleen. I was informed more than once on the authority of the Chief Medical Officer that the risk for recipients of blood donors who subsequently died of vCJD was purely "hypothetical"; but that demonstrably is not the case now. Is donated blood currently being screened, or filtered to remove vCJD infection? If it is not, can my noble friend in replying to the debate say what protection is in place to safeguard recipients of donated blood? I understand, and my noble friend will confirm whether it is so, that technology is now available to remove by filter the abnormal prions which are the causative agent of vCJD and that it has passed EU-wide safety testing and clinical trials as required for its use in the UK. The haemophilia community, like Members of both sides of both Houses of Parliament, are anxious to secure ministerial assurances of urgent and effective action in this policy area, and I look forward to my noble friend’s response to the questions that I have raised. The other issue to which I must finally refer is that of Crown immunity, on which the Archer report raises in commenting on behaviour of the Blood Products Laboratory (BPL). The report says: ""In July 1979, the Medicines Inspectorate visited BPL. They reported that the buildings were never designed for the scale of production envisaged. They commented: ‘If this were a commercial operation we would have no hesitation in recommending that manufacture should cease until the facility was upgraded to a minimum acceptable level.’"." The report then says: ""BPL was rescued by Crown Immunity"," and goes on to say that, ""the existing plant continued production, relying on Crown Immunity to dispense with all the requirements of the Medicines Act, but was able to meet only about 40 per cent of the national requirements"," Surely, words have lost their meaning if this does not mean that by the use of Crown immunity, a relic of feudal England, the lives of countless haemophilia patients were blatantly and gravely put at risk. In this House on 10 March, the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, responding to me in exchanges about thalidomide, referred to, ""the tremendous amount of work that has gone into the marketing, testing and regulation of drugs, as encapsulated in the Medicines Act 1968, from which society has benefited greatly".—[Official Report, 10/3/09; col. 1059.]" There could be no clearer text for describing the enormity of the use by the BPL of Crown immunity to dispense with all the requirements of that renowned and vital statute. I beg to move.