10 June 2022: Gutowski - B

Straight off the bat, it is revealed how in all the flash of developments towards establishing a payment scheme, there had been no involvement of Wales and Northern Ireland. It was not an oversight; it was a deliberate decision. This was to be carved out between Scotland and England/UK, and the other two would have to be on catch-up when their doors were open. Early doors, the discussions recognised and incorporated every useful financially limiting factors such as missing medical records and excluding affected people. Given the urgency, it seemed to make sense for England to simply adopt the Chisholm proposals. The Ross Report was dismissed due to the costs of its relatively greater generosity. John Reid wanted a “realistic” (i.e. cheap as possible) scheme, especially with the Treasury sticking to its guns of not dipping its hands into its pockets. Surely, that raises alarm bells (if such needed to be raised) due the recently re-emphasised calls for the Treasury to foot the bill for future compensation resulting from the Infected Blood Inquiry as recorded in the Robert Francis report.

Sadly, the outlying location of Northern Ireland both physically and politically, as well as the afterthought add-on that is Wales, was exacerbated by these matters. The fall-out is still being felt, especially in NI. It is telling how much effort was put into “exceptions and variations” to exclude as many people as possible and to minimise payments to those who could not be excluded by the best efforts of the officials to do that for as many people as possible. How caring was that? It wasn’t.

Mr Gutowski appears to have the articulation of a denture wearer (no offence meant to fellow “wallies” wearers), and in the setting of being a witness, it may be contributing to a diminution of any air of authority he walked in with. Stepping back a bit from the displayed documents related to the eligibility criteria for scheme payments, the underlying process seems to be one which starts with a budget which is then given to the officials as an immovable maximum to work within, and so they were to set criteria based on apparent affordability and not on assessed need or recognised losses. It was a top-down process with scant regard for the individuals and families at the bottom of the food chain who required to be supported. Whether there was any humanity, sympathy, or compassion for infected and affected people, it didn’t matter. The machine was determined to grind people down into compliance, acceptance, and servile gratitude. The references to “affordability” are triggering, especially in the context of recent profligate magic-tree spending to try to make the Government look like it was on top of the Coronavirus/Covid-19 situation. And worse still, despite this pandemically-driven quantitative easing spending spree, they still failed. Affordability is a bogus nonsense in a political context. If they want to afford something, they will find the money, especially if it means they stay in power or keep their seats. Returning to the witness, he says he can’t remember if he ever tried to get more money. What? This point has to have been burned into the memory, for sure. And actually going to the Treasury himself “would have been way above my pay-grade”.

On making the announcement of a scheme, the witness says doing it by a Written Statement rather than from the Despatch Box gave it more gravitas. The suggestion that doing it this way avoided the chance of someone asking a question in the Chamber was not accepted by the witness as being a ploy to stifle debate. Oh, really.

It is with some pity to acknowledge how it might be, even it does appear to be, that Mr Gutowski actually believes what he was doing was right, and what he is saying about it now is plausible. The fly in the ointment of feeling any sympathy for this witness’s situation is his too frequent inability to recall what were surely crucial elements to the whole episode. Someone can easily not remember the colour of the pencil on their desk on a particular day, but to have so little memory of the vital facts of your work activity seems just too convenient. His default mind-set was to find any way to cut costs, regardless of the situation being faced by people, and he appeared to see no problem at all with this. Maybe it is a requirement of the civil servant training programme to undergo a heart transplant, involving the heart being replaced by a block of ice. 

Because Christine Lee was not passing whole classes of potentially eligible claimants, it stopped others from allowing them. (Thanks again Prof Lee.) So, when there was a tele-conference to discuss matters related to payments and eligibility criteria, she was the one who was asked to attend. When asked why there was not a clinician who held different (i.e. less hawkish) views, Mr Gutowski could not recall – again. Subsequently, it appears that the views of Christine Lee as expressed at that meeting were adopted – surprise, surprise.

Whenever a new set of circumstances were encountered, the knee-jerk reaction was to find a way to exclude any people it related to. Spontaneous clearers were especially detrimented. The pretence was exposed of giving people the “benefit of the doubt”, for example, when medical records were missing, by the insistence on the need for “robust medical evidence”. Hugh Nicholas was the main source of medical advice to the witness. The witness expected Bob Stock in Scotland would have almost certainly gone to Aileen Keel. (We can hardly wait for her evidence sessions; ‘bet she’s been watching, and hopefully quivering.) The witness does not recall any occasion of advice being sought from out with the Department on these matters.

In the handover to the person who followed when Mr Gutowski moved on from his post, he almost described a live topic which would have significantly impacted on the lives of people as a “small matter”, but he pulled back to call it instead a “specific matter”, and one which would not have been part of a handover (maybe due to its lack of size?) The Chair sought a point of clarity, but more boldly than before the witness assertively rejected a suggested explanation on the point Sir Brian raised.

It was noted how an appeals system was not set up at the time the scheme rolled was. Out of the blue the witness paused to take full responsibility for not having made sure the appeals process was in place earlier. But unfortunately, Mr Gutowski’s foray into self-reflection was laced with excuses such as not having enough staff available to him, and the time involved in making appointments based on the Nolan criteria. Our hearts bleed for you Mr G, they truly don’t.