27 July 2022: Hunt - B
The questioning shifted to the inadequacy of the Alliance House schemes. There were no longer fit for purpose (… guys, they never were). The Haemophilia Society, other groups, and their political advocates such as Alastair Burt were pressing for a root and branch change. As this pressure became irresistible, officials had to come up with options. Typically, they had come up with three options with a note attached saying two of them were unaffordable. (Does that still allow them to be called “options”? This writer’s solution to the fuel cost rises might be the option to burn all the furniture in the house for heating. Is that an option?) The usual stumbling block to having an options appraisal that was actually useful was money, especially if the thinking was restricted to seeing the NHS budget as the only source of cash. As usual, the country was going through a financial crisis; just like there is always a sale on at DFS. Maybe the chances of interim payments would be enhanced by not asking for £100,000 but instead asking for £99,999 amounts.
The calls and considerations for better financial support were mainly being handled by Anna Soubry and then Jane Ellison. The analysis cited a range of potential costs of between £61million and £410million, which hardly sounds like a focused consideration. The NHS was already raiding capital spend budget headings to support frontline work. The documents acknowledged how the amounts of financial support were not based on a proper analysis of need, but more a case of what could be afforded, mixed with a fair bit of “Think of a number”. It became obvious that a meaningful improvement to financial support for infected and affected people could not come from NHS coffers. Interestingly, direct input into the process came from Alex Neil MSP who as Cabinet Secretary for Health in Scotland had commissioned the Scoping Study on the impact of Hepatitis C infection among Scottish citizens which was carried out by the Scottish Infected Blood Forum (SIBF).
The figure of £25million came up as something the Prime Minister wanted to put into the pot. Contextually, this was happening while everyone was waiting for the landing of the Penrose Report on their desks (and too often, in their bins). It does appear that Mr Hunt was maintaining a sufficient level of awareness of a matter ostensibly being covered by a Junior Minister. One suggestion, a re-configuration to move the money around in a “fairer” way would have resulted in some people gaining and some people facing a reduction, which the witness described as, “A nonsense way forward”. The £25million was agreed between the witness and David Cameron in the middle of 2014, but no announcement was made until 2015.
“We thought it was a bit of a damp squib”, was the reaction to the publication of the Penrose Report within the DH. That was not seen as a good thing. Mr Hunt had wanted to use it as a lever in his efforts to get a better deal for infected and affected people. Then came the public apology by David Cameron, including the £25million. Unfortunately, (which is not a good word to start a sentence about money for infected and affected people) Parliament was soon thereafter dissolved and a General Election was called. This stopped anything meaningful moving forward until that process was over.
After the election, the Conservative Government reformed with Mr Hunt remaining as Health Minister. He could not say if England followed the single Penrose Recommendation. What did resume were the considerations about how to fund the necessary changes to the support schemes. The witness wrote to the Prime Minister, stressing the urgency of the situation. One option was to try to do it all within the additional £25million. The witness summed up the anticipated response from campaigners to that option as likely seeing as, “A slap in the face”. Another option would cost more, but it would end the schemes by buying people out of them with a one-off amount, but with some arrangement for people to continue to access priority NHS treatments. He recognised how this would be controversial, especially since the amounts involved were far less than the Irish scheme. Another option was to divert a “plucked out of the air” £100million from DH budgets to make payments less stingy. Even that option was already also known to be not satisfactory to campaigners, but it was all being pulled together on the basis of knowing the Treasury was flatly refusing to entertain any money coming from them. The witnesses’ preferred option was the one-off buy-out, but none of the options were satisfactory.
The concept of removing support payments to people who were ostensibly well, in particular, widows who were not themselves infected, was considered as a possible way of diverting money to the actually infected. The Scottish Government completely distanced themselves from any proposals which would have removed money from people. This writer cannot help but reflect how coming to an understanding of the way some of these peoples’ minds worked was frightening. They are running the country on our behalf with no perception of the impacts on real people of their on-paper workings. At the stroke of a pen, a whole load of vulnerable peoples’ lives – lives which were already damaged beyond belief – might have been further hammered by a completely heartless spreadsheet entry. There comes a time when the defence of saying, “There were hard choices to be made”, just does not stand up in the face of such gross unfairness. At some point the availability, or not, of money becomes irrelevant. How could they not see we had already reached that point, indeed, had long passed it? There are barely words to express a commensurate response to their money-driven machinations; and that includes any reactions by those who are justifiably tempted to go beyond civil discourse.
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