Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, I want first to thank my noble friend Lady Thornton for doing so much to make it possible for this debate to take place at a time when my dear and inspirational friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, can be with us. As she said so movingly and so memorably in the debate on the Archer report last Thursday, the history of the contaminated blood disaster is one of unspeakable suffering for, ""mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives, husbands and friends … seeing their loved ones die".—[Official Report, 23/4/09; col. 1614.]" When I announced the setting-up of the Archer inquiry in February 2007, 1,757 patients had died. Since then, of a patient group of barely 5,000, over 200 more have died in direct consequence of the use of contaminated blood in their NHS treatment. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, was herself widowed by the disaster, and I know that the House very much looks forward to hearing her speak again. Today’s is the third debate in which the case for my proposed new clause will have been addressed; and I will not be returning to questions dealt with in Committee and last Thursday. However, many of the questions then raised went unanswered due, not least, to pressure of time, and there are some that must be pursued today. I refer not only to questions of mine but to those of other participants, including the noble Lords, Lord Thomas of Gresford, Lord Corbett and Lord Rooker, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Campbell, Lady Barker and Lady Morris of Bolton. The first unanswered question is whether it is now clearly understood by the department that the body for which my proposed new clause provides would be a statutory one. Correspondence between the department and the Haemophilia Society envisages a non-statutory body and is at variance with the intention of the Archer report. Thus it will be helpful if my noble friend Lord Darzi, in replying to this debate, can clarify the department’s intended response. I turn now to the urgency of the need for an updating of ministerial Statements to Parliament on the sombre threat of a third deadly scourge to patients dependent on NHS blood and blood products. The vCJD threat is increasingly worrying, a recent post-mortem on a hepatitis C-infected patient having found variant CJD in his spleen, thus totally undermining the Chief Medical Officer’s assessment of the risk as "hypothetical". Specifically, we need to know the department’s current figure for the number of patients treated with blood taken from variant CJD-infected donors. We need also to know what action Ministers have taken since the post-mortem on the implications of its findings. Further, how do they now assess the risk facing patients treated with blood taken from such donors, and what protection is now in place to safeguard recipients of donated blood? As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, said, the issue of Crown immunity must also be pursued. The Archer inquiry’s report raised it in commenting on the behaviour of the Blood Products Laboratory—the BPL—and said: ""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 Archer report then starkly stated: ""BPL was rescued by Crown Immunity"—" and went on that BPL’s, ""existing plant continued production, relying on Crown Immunity to dispense with the requirements of the Medicines Act, but was able to meet only 40 per cent of the national requirements"." Thus, by the use of Crown immunity, a relic of feudal England, the lives of countless haemophilia patients were blatantly and gravely put at risk. Speaking in the House on 10 March, my noble friend 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 than this for describing the enormity of the BPL’s use of Crown immunity to dispense with all the requirements of that renowned and so vitally important statute; hence the need to reflect again in this debate on from whom the BPL was "rescued" by its use of Crown immunity. First and foremost, of course, it was "rescued" from the afflicted and bereaved by the disaster, thereby denying them any prospect of legal redress, a denial made all the more cruelly unjust by the refusals of successive Governments to agree to a public inquiry. So they were left with no hope of any independent assessment of responsibility for their plight until the Archer inquiry was announced. Crown immunity has now been abolished. It was ended by John Major’s Conservative Government in 1991, and infected NHS patients ask why the present Government, who clearly have no intention of reinstating Crown immunity, cannot now review the claims of the victims contaminated by NHS blood from whom the BPL was "rescued" by Crown immunity. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, said in his speech last Thursday that he was sure that it would be possible for actions to be brought now if the Government chose to waive, dating back as necessary, Crown immunity. Have the Government, opposed as they must surely be to Crown immunity, considered this possibility? Most of all, we need to know in this debate when the Government now expect to respond to the Archer report as a whole and how we can be sure that parliamentary time will be found for their response to be fully debated in your Lordships’ House. Meanwhile, I hope that a positive response to this new clause—one giving a clear pointer to the Government’s intentions vis-à-vis the report as a whole—will be forthcoming. As I made clear both in Committee and elsewhere, the new clause can be implemented at no great cost but much to the relief of haemophilia patients who feel strongly that there must be no delay now in creating a statutory committee to advise government on the management of haemophilia, with patient and family representation. Of course there will be costs in giving full effect to the Archer report, but there will also be priceless benefits in enabling haemophilia patients to live fuller and more fulfilling lives. Naturally, their principal desire is for closure with the Department of Health on their claims for just treatment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, told the House last Thursday: ""When we are ill, we have faith that the treatment that we receive will help to make us better, or will help us to manage the disease so that we can lead as full and dignified a life as possible. To receive treatment that leads to such tragic consequences is unimaginably cruel".—[Official Report, 23/4/09; col. 1628.]" Surely parliamentarians have no more compelling duty than to them. It may, however, be said that, self-evident though the Archer report has made the case for closure, a time of deep recession is not one in which to expect it to be achieved. Yet some aspects of the current difficulties are frequently compared, not inappropriately, with those faced by Denis Healey—now my noble friend Lord Healey—when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and had to resort to the IMF for support. Harold Wilson, then Prime Minister, in whose Government I served, said that it was a time for the broadest backs to bear the biggest burdens, but he needed no reminding that my responsibilities, as the first Minister for Disabled People, were for those with broken backs and even more handicapping disabilities. He and Denis Healey readily enabled me to introduce a severe disability allowance, the mobility allowance, the carers’ allowance and many other benefits which both Harold Wilson and Denis Healey said later were the Government’s finest achievements. I hope that may put in some perspective the cries of alarm from anyone who thinks that acting justly to this small and stricken patient community is insupportable. Its claims are entitled to be seen as a priority of priorities and I know that my noble friend Lord Darzi will want to reply as helpfully as he can. I look forward to hearing him as we proceed.