My Lords, the Committee listened with great interest to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Owen, and the honourable part he played in this tragic situation. I was a Minister of Health much later, between 1995 and 1997, and I had to struggle with problems with the Treasury and getting reasonable compensation for the victims—the infected and the affected—as he said. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for raising this issue today so that we could have a debate of this kind. It is necessary, and we should keep pressing.
I was appalled by the Statement by John Glen before Christmas in the other place. It was one of the emptiest Statements I have heard from a Minister in that situation. It was as though the Government were just going through the motions of giving a Statement because they had committed themselves to doing so, without having anything at all to say, which is extremely disappointing. I was grateful to my noble friend Lord Howe for having much more sensible and positive things to say in his letters so far. We hope he can follow those up.
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The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, put his finger on something very important: namely, the way we handle all these sorts of problems, not only the tragedy of this particular case, and the length of time taken by these inquiries. This inquiry was actioned in 2017 and started in 2018, so it has been going for over six years—we won the Second World War in less time—and we still do not have an end date, although we hope it will be this May. The Swedes took one year to do a Covid inquiry; we will take God knows how many years on ours. How long are we taking on Grenfell? How long did we take on Chilcot? It is ridiculous that we take so long on these things. The Government should pay attention to how we handle their length and complexity. At maximum, we should take two years to deal with these issues. That is long enough to come to some clear conclusions and get positive evidence. I hope the Government will take that into account as well as all the other important issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Owen.