Nick Thomas-Symonds

I hope to be able to make an announcement about it shortly. I have told the House previously how important I think the memorialisation proposals are, and they will certainly form part of the update that I will give the House before the end of the year. I join the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney), in congratulating the students whom she has had with her and on the work that they did in researching this subject for her speech. What she said about a culture of cover-up was important. What Sir Brian Langstaff said was not that there was some specific conspiracy between individuals, but that there was something far more pervasive, which he described as a culture of “institutional defensiveness”. People and institutions put their own reputations above the public interest, and to tackle that the Government will be pushing forward with a duty of candour. That, in my view, will be a powerful lever that the House can pull for change, but it is not just about a change in the law. It is about leadership as well, and it is about culture and changing the culture, in order to bring about a system in which the public interest is put first and we collectively do all that we can to minimise the chances of a repetition of what has happened in relation to not just this scandal but others, such as Horizon and Hillsborough. The hon. Lady and a number of other Members asked about the severity bands. The scheme is tariff-based, and the tariffs were developed through the work of the infected blood inquiry response expert group, whose members were appointed by the right hon. Member for Salisbury when he was Paymaster General. They were clinical and legal advisers, assisted by social care specialists. The Government then chose to improve the scheme after the engagement exercise that Sir Robert Francis carried out, as I mentioned to the right hon. Gentleman during the general election campaign. The comparison between HIV and hepatitis C has been raised. For people infected with hepatitis C there are four severity bands, and they are designed in line with clinical diagnostic markers. Recognised health conditions, for example liver damage, have, therefore, been informed by the work of the expert group. It is correct that in comparison there is a single severity band for people infected with HIV. That is because HIV is a lifelong infection. The vast majority of people infected with HIV through blood products have experienced progression to advanced symptomatic HIV disease, including AIDS conditions, and have died as a consequence of the infection. Those who survived continue to be severely impacted by the infection, and the view of the expert group was that it was disproportionately complex and onerous to disaggregate that category into different experiences, and that contrasted with hepatitis, where there is a wide range of experiences, including both acute infections with long-term limited impacts and very serious and ultimately fatal infections. That is the approach, based on the expert group, that the Government have adopted. Similarly, on siblings, which several Members have raised, the scheme is based on recommendations from Sir Robert Francis’s framework compensation study. It does not exclude siblings over 18 who may have been carers and provided care.