8 June 2022: Lister - A

Setting aside the witness’s Putin-esque looks (for the time being), Mr Lister was a career civil servant. His considerable collection of roles included working under Keith Joseph and Barbara Castle (?), with steady and comprehensive progress towards food and health safety issues, including salmonella in eggs and BSE. His senior administrative roles became progressively more powerful. He was also involved in embryo and fertilisation work, as well as, most significantly, blood policy. The witness was also a Caxton Trustee; so, so much for Caxton being an arms-length body – more like it was a fall-guy to take the heat off the Government while still doing their bidding.

The Civil Service Code lists the main ways of being in a public service role, specifically, “integrity, honesty, impartiality, and objectivity”. The further quotes from the Code were enlightening in their apparently intended idealism in the face of real-life experience where the alternative (actual) Code was more a case of secrecy, delay, half-truth telling, and opinionated discrimination based on privileged prejudices. The Code was never trained into them, but it was expected to be understood and picked up along the way. The witness said the hardest part was to be objective and impartial in giving advice to the government of the day.

“It is always a case of ‘hit the ground running’” said the witness about taking up new appointments. The pattern of people not being inducted into new roles suggests that the actual subject of the role was less important than the overarching emphasis on civil servant basics; such as protecting the public purse and protecting your minister, regardless of what the policy area was all about. He explained how those in his type of roles had to make sure then did what they had to do within the available resources. Seeking additional resources was always part of the focus. On the matter of the bounds of authority to act or pass up to more senior officials or even Ministers, it was basically a judgement call by the person in his level of seniority. When it involved public money, that always required Ministerial input and approval. Similarly, if the issue was likely to attract public interest, that too had to be elevated.

It was common for junior ministers to change frequently, whereas the Secretary of State usually stuck around for longer. From his perspective, there was a great deal of importance placed on developing a good working relationship with the Minister. It was always clear which Minister an issue had to go to.

The policy of not holding a public inquiry into contaminated blood was already well established before the witness was in the blood policy role. Once decided, there had to be a significant reason for changing a policy, with the emphasis being on rebutting any attempt to go against the policy, including by having scripted lines to say if questions were asked. A new Minister or Government might make an issue of a particular topic, but normally a new person was swamped by a huge information pack.

Mr Lister appears to have done his job as part of the “permanent government” as well as expected by continuing to give his Ministers a long list of reasons for not paying compensation and not holding a public inquiry. Increasingly, the aim of protecting the established position extended to making sure the Minister would also stick with the policy. By this time the “lines to take” were very well established. “Looking at it again, not every fact (as stated in one of the lines at the time) was in the public domain as had been suggested at the time” he seemed to be saying. What a mealy-mouthed get-out. What about all the public pronouncements on the Contaminated Blood Scandal like, “it should never have happened”, and “this has gone on for far too long”, etc? Who was responsible to resisting what has only more recently been seen as a terrible neglect? It was not until the ground shifted in Scotland that the rest of the UK were forced to sit up and take notice. Documents from the time even recognised how the Department of Health (DH) had been the responsible body setting policy, and not those in the territories.

When asked about the Ministers he knew who had either maintained or questioned the resistance to an inquiry, he said (effectively), “I would be reluctant to answer that because I would be relying on a pretty faulty memory”. This is so typical of a civil servant saying a lot but actually saying very little. They must have been trained to do this at Government School. The training worked. Also from his statement, rather than simply saying that “in hindsight” a public inquiry should have happened sooner, he cannot resist the temptation to use one hundred words when one would suffice (“Yes”).

Mr Lister was the person who had to look out the Dr David Owen (by then, Lord Owen) papers from 1973 on seeking to achieve self-sufficiency when he was the responsible Minister, only to discover they were missing. Recognising the need for further delving into archives, additional staff time was sought to do this. Files appear to have been extracted for reasons of Public Interest Immunity, for passing to various lawyers, and other reasons, but somehow, they had not made their way back. This investigation became known as the Burgin (?) Review. Burgin was an in-house appointee who was tasked with reviewing what had happened to that original aim of achieving self-sufficiency. Reading the sections of the review displayed by Counsel, it smacked of an exercise in distributing sufficient covers for those posteriors involved then and so potentially vulnerable to exposure without that remedial action. The report served its purpose in further endorsing the policy position not to hold a public inquiry; as if that outcome was ever in doubt.

The increasing public awareness of AIDS and Hepatitis as viral risks in blood seemed to be a turning point in forcing a review of the position, at least on making payments to people. The line was maintained that the best available evidence at the time did not justify an admission of liability because people were “doing the best they could at the time”. (Grrr, that phrase again.) Thus, compensation remained out of the question. It begs the question, was the resistance to holding a public inquiry maintained because that activity might result in the evidence actually being brought to light?

On meeting “victims”, Lord Hunt found it increasingly difficult to face going into Parliament to trot out the rehearsed lines, because the realities presented to him from meeting actual sufferers stuck with him. But his desire to do something to help people was stopped by the more senior Minister, Alan Milburn (which makes Mr Milburn another marked card, so that come the revolution and the placing of guilty parties up against the proverbial wall, he’s there among the first).