Everyone is talking about infected blood scandal now, but calls for compensation went unheard for years – Jackie Baillie

The scandal of contaminated blood products is a particularly appalling example of the powerful protecting themselves over the powerless

It is hard to feel anything except a deep and burning sense of shame over the UK’s infected blood scandal. Of course, the NHS delivers life-saving treatments every day but the final report from the contaminated blood inquiry has laid bare a devastating and abject failure of the health service and the state to care for patients over years.

It could hardly believed to be possible but this disaster, an entirely avoidable tragedy for thousands of patients, manages to cast shade on the Post Office scandal. It carries echoes of Hillsborough, Grenfell and Windrush as the ultimate example of the powerful protecting themselves over the powerless.

Sir Brian Langstaff’s report confirms the worst of what we already knew. Some 3,000 people died after 30,000 were given contaminated blood products or transfusions from the 1970s to the early 1990s. It tells us that this was no accident, they were failed by the medical establishment.

NHS patients were given blood products containing infections like HIV and hepatitis C for years (Picture: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)

The comprehensive and excoriating detail in Langstaff’s report signposts the numerous occasions and events when disaster could have been prevented and lives saved. Instead those with the power and responsibility to act were let off the hook by people’s misplaced faith in public service and public good. Medics and civil servants felt their job was to protect their own reputations, rather than the lives of those they serve. And politicians of all colours failed to act, relying on the information they were given.

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Everyone is talking about the contaminated blood scandal now but Labour MP Dame Diana Johnson has been raising the issue for years, demanding the government drop the shillyshally act and start paying out interim compensation. It may be late but now is the time for national recognition and proper restitution.

This is the latest in a long line of NHS scandals made worse by cover-ups by officials and institutions. The claims of the patients of cruel treatment turned out to be entirely accurate and the callous concealment of the truth by the health and political establishment turned out to be entirely true.

There are always lessons to be learned. For the sake of those who died and the thousands still alive that must mean serious measures to protect whistleblowers, to impose transparency and to have a process of acknowledging and correcting inevitable errors which come with medical treatment instead of instinctive denial and cover-up.

Here are the key findings from the Infected Blood Inquiry report

Meanwhile, compensation of the victims of this scandal has to be a priority. At the root of the cover-up is a deliberate decision within the Treasury, maintained by governments of different colours, that there could be no admission of liability because that would open the door to compensation. The cost of these obdurate denials, the endless delays, the collusion and the cover-up is measured in 3,000 lost lives and tears of pain for thousands of patients and their families.

A £10 billion compensation bill does not match the burning shame of the scandal. But if there is to be any justice for the lost and ruined lives, there must be full and comprehensive payment to the victims without delay.

Jackie Baillie is MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour’s deputy leader and her party’s spokesperson for health