Delaying payouts for blood and Post Office victims is scandalous
LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES
The familiar truism that justice delayed is justice denied has taken on a morbid sense of urgency for the many victims of the Post Office and infected blood scandals. Thanks to the courageous persistence of campaigners, public officials have been forced to face up to the moral enormity of these past wrongs: respectively, the most widespread miscarriage of justice, and gravest case of medical malpractice, in recent memory. Yet, those charged with remedying these injustices are continuing to drag their feet in awarding victims due redress.
It has been estimated that at least 100 further victims of the infected blood scandal have died in the protracted interim between the conclusion of Sir Brian Langstaff's inquiry last year and being invited to apply for compensation. Likewise, some 345 former sub-postmasters are thought to have died before securing any financial restitution. Those still pursuing claims now find themselves caught in an interminable, tortuous, legalistic wrangle: one that seems cynically designed to delay and minimise the total amount of compensation that will eventually have to be paid out.
• Keir Starmer: infected blood victims deserve justice now
A report published last week into the human toll of the prosecutions made on the basis of the Post Office's defective Horizon IT system was unsparing in its grim detail. Its author, Sir Wyn Williams, concluded that the scandal had driven 13 people to suicide. Many other lives were blighted by addiction, divorce and financial ruin. Yet, the government's declared determination to correct these wrongs is belied by the gross deficiencies Sir Wyn identifies in the remuneration of those harmed.
The Post Office compensation programme is byzantine in its complexity, with four separate schemes running in parallel. 3,700 former subpostmasters are yet to receive any payout. Many are locked in a legal limbo while their claims are subjected to excessively bureaucratic and adversarial scrutiny. Claimants are disadvantaged if they can't produce decades-old forms, often long lost. One sub-postmistress claims to have received a compensation offer worth just 0.5 per cent of her original claim. Sir Alan Bates, who championed his fellow sub-postmasters' cause, has fallen victim to what he describes as a 'quasi-kangaroo court', receiving a 'take it or leave it' quote amounting to less than half his submitted claim.
Similarly shameful treatment has been meted out to those survivors among the 30,000 NHS patients infected with HIV and hepatitis by contaminated blood products. Last week, Sir Brian Langstaff warned that this compensation system too is creating 'obvious injustice'. Only 460 people have received full payouts, the result of a dilatory process forcing victims to be invited to make a claim rather than initiate one themselves.
• Infected blood victims 'left suicidal' by compensation delays
It is clear that government officials and civil servants tasked with disbursing payouts are subjecting comparatively powerless individuals to a level of rigoristic penny-pinching they would not dream of applying elsewhere. When set alongside the kind of financial waste casually tolerated within government, from the eye-watering sums sunk into HS2 to the near £2 billion in 'bounce back loan' fraud complacently written off by the very same department of business overseeing appeals by victims of the Post Office, the contrast is galling. Victims of the infected blood and Post Office scandals have had their right to restitution established by due process. Obstructionist officials should not be allowed to deny them justice.
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