6 July 2022: Waldegrave - A

It was date-stamp 1991 as the first morning session of the second day of questioning was directed at William Waldegrave. It appeared that despite not having blood policy within his personal brief, the good Lord kept getting dragged in to deal with the unresolved matter of payments to NHS infected people. For him to be giving oral evidence at an Inquiry in 2022, it would suggest that he and everyone in between the 31 years and more actually had not adequately dealt with it yet.

The discussions surrounding the HIV Litigation being extended from haemophiliacs to whole blood patients was then still bumping into the Treasury spat, as well as the rising recognition of a further potential exposure to similar claims related to viral Hepatitis. So, having a Secretary of State minded to extend payments to transfusion victims was not good timing if you were a Treasury Minister or mandarin. At the same time, the witness had secured what was recognised as a very good financial settlement for the DH in the latest spending round, so Lord Waldegrave was further emboldened to open up the ring-fence. Some reference was made to the option of accessing something called the “Personal Fund”. When asked what that was the witness said, “The Personal Fund was a very small amount, perhaps a £1million or so”. It was a useful amount available only to senior politicians to allow smaller projects or unexpected costs to be supported without impacting significantly on main departmental funds. If a proposed spend of someone’s Personal Fund was large enough, it still had to be passed by the Treasury. But in general, Governments find it useful to have smaller stashes of cash squirreled away for rainy days. This writer’s Glaswegian granny would refer to such an amount hidden within the home as a “plank”.

The developments in making payments to AIDS infected people were meant to cover the UK as a whole, so the Territorial Ministers had to be kept in mind, particularly given the oversight from the recent past and the problems of excluding them from a relevant steering group had caused. However, the Permanent Secretary was minded very differently indeed. Lord Waldegrave recognised how, when a senior civil servant says, “I advise long reflection”, he means, “Don’t do it”. This had caused the witness to seriously reflect, given the weight of such advice, and he sought the views of his Ministerial colleagues to see if he had gone mad. One of them thought he had, but most seemed to acknowledge the situation. It appears that the political expediency to widen the ring-fence was being accepted as an inevitability, albeit very reluctantly by many. This was a case of the political need, including reputationally, trumping the fiscal and party line management needs. It was right for the civil servants to warn against moving in a certain direction said the witness, especially a new one at odds with a long-standing policy. Holding the line had become untenable, particularly in the face of rising public concern of the Government not acting and appearing to be uncaring and heartless. The witness accepted that these shifts were very much his own initiative. He mentioned how there are always campaigns running on a variety of issues, and politicians are always aware of these, especially if the weight of public opinion was going against their stance. He was not just responding to a shift in public opinion, he asserted, but to a case of people who should be supported.

The main correspondent from the Territorial Departments was, again, Ian Lang from Scotland. He supported the move to extend payments to whole blood patients and the idea of the Macfarlane Trust being the distributing body. Subsequently, similar letters of support followed from Wales and Northern Ireland. They each recognised the possibility of some Departmental funds being required to top up what needed to be paid, and the Territorial Departments seemed happy to acknowledged their potential part in this aspect. Basically, Lord Waldegrave had boxed in the Treasury. For their part, the money men (and less often the money women), continued to assert the worry over these matters moving closer and closer to no-fault compensation (remembering the Rosie Barnes proposals were then a live issue, too). David Mellor was continuing to say “No” to the Waldegrave proposals but given his job he had to. It even seemed to Lord Waldegrave like the Treasury would not approve monies if they came from DH funds as opposed to continuing to access the Reserves. It was increasingly recognised across Government how the ring-fence excluding whole blood patients was unsustainable. Ultimately, the Prime Minister (John Major) had to “come to the rescue” of Lord Waldegrave and by association, to rescue the victims of contaminated blood. (Somehow the image of a grey Prime Minister, with his shirt firmly tucked into his tighty-whities, fighting the battle on the side of infected and affected people is a cognitive dissonance too far for this writer.) AIDS was simply too big a public concern for the Government to resist changing its mind. So, the special case designation was extended to all infected people with the judgement criteria being the AIDS factor alone, and not the co-morbidity of AIDS and a bleeding disorder. So, the previously stated strategy of the lawyer for victims of starting with one group (haemophiliacs) to secure payments, and then pushing for it to include others (whole blood), had proven successful.

Having gotten to the point of the Government having made the mountain-moving shift, Counsel then sought to explore the length of time it took for changes to happen. Lord Waldegrave felt that while someone else might have progressed things more swiftly, he saw his having moved two long-standing policy positions in the space of a year was no small achievement. The campaigners certainly helped, he seemed happy to acknowledge.

The related matter of people having been similarly infected with Hepatitis C (as it became known), involving the same cohorts and the same transmission routes, was not an element within the HIV developments as far as the witness could recall. It may have been that this emerging matter was not elevated to the level of the Secretary of State, as it had been for the specific AIDS situation. The management of Hepatitis-related matters seems to have been retained by more junior ministers. The witness recognised that that issue may well have been dealt with differently and more swiftly, but he could not comment since he had not seen all the relevant papers. Reviewing this whole set of circumstances shows how the processes of a representative democracy-based Government operates as a machine which serves the people by firstly serving itself.

Counsel sought the views of the witness on reflective learning, not just by individuals but also by whole Departments. As a starting point, they had to know what specific thing they got wrong before they could right that particular wrong. The witness referred to a document written by a young William Waldegrave which he had drafted as a 20-something year old. It was from a general policy perspective and was about the need for greater public communication and openness by Government. Unknown to the young man, it was sent directly to the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath. When the young man discovered this had been sent as a recommendation to be applied across the whole of Government, he was taken by surprise. In hindsight, political observers of careers would see this as an early indication of a new start rising in the Conservative Party. Given the scale and depth of his career at Westminster, this would not have been an inaccurate assessment. It certainly justifies, for example, the gushingly given description of Mr Waldegrave as an intellectual heavyweight at the top of the party. And in the view of this writer, his performance at the Inquiry has similarly not taken anything away from that profile either.

Finally for Counsel, the issue of openness when things go wrong was discussed as a difficulty for Governments generally. Counsel asserted that Departments and Ministers find it hard to say they got something wrong. Lord Waldegrave saw the problem being based on the adversarial system because the other side will jump on any admission of error as justification for them suggesting the apologiser could get other things wrong, so he or she or they ought not to be given someone’s vote (either of confidence or on a ballot paper).