A small team has started looking at the infected blood inquiry’s final report on behalf of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, as lawyers said the time that has passed since the alleged offences should not be a bar to prosecutions.
Brian Langstaff did not address the issue of criminal liability in his report, as this lies outside the remit of public inquiries, but calls for prosecutions have amplified over his findings of NHS and government culpability, which included shredding of documents to hide evidence.
Speaking after publication of the report on Monday, many campaigners were pessimistic about the prospect of such an outcome, given the time that had elapsed. But on Tuesday the cabinet minister, Mel Stride, told GB News that prosecutions would be looked at “very carefully”, while the Guardian has learned that the National Police Chiefs’ Council is examining Langstaff’s report.
David Claxton, a barrister with Red Lion Chambers, said: “It [the inquiry] has plainly been able to identify individuals and organisations which are at fault or culpable in one way or another. So I would have thought that there is enough evidence available to prosecute, provided that the individuals and organisations are identified sufficiently and in the case of individuals [they] are still around and in the case of organisations [they] still exist.”
Among the potential charges that have been mooted are corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter and misconduct in public office.
Claxton ruled out corporate manslaughter on the grounds that it was only introduced in 2007, after the alleged offending occurred, but he said there could also be health and safety offences with “some potential to prosecute NHS Trusts, the NHS, government departments, laboratories, for that sort of wrongdoing”.
Lord Saville, a former supreme court justice who chaired the Bloody Sunday inquiry, told Times Radio that prosecutions were “certainly conceivable”, while the former director of public prosecutions, Max Hill KC, told the station he was unable to say whether prosecutions were feasible, but that the criminal law could “provide answers … even decades after the event”.
Claxton said that while it was harder to prosecute offences when a long time had passed because less evidence may exist, that may be less of an issue in the contaminated blood scandal as there was “plenty that the inquiry chair has been able to rely on and to gather as evidence”.
In the cases of those individuals who have died, the inquiry’s findings have come too late for prosecutions.
After publication of the report, Jason Evans, who founded the Factor 8 campaign and who was four years old when his father died after receiving blood contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C, said Prof Arthur Bloom, who led the Cardiff haemophilia centre, and Dr Charles Rizza, director of the Oxford haemophilia reference centre, were two medical professionals criticised in the report who could not be brought to justice because they had died.
Langstaff said it was “astonishing” and “unfathomable” that Bloom minimised the risk posed by commercial blood products used to treat haemophiliacs even after one of his own patients in Cardiff contracted Aids. He also criticised a joint letter Rizza sent along with Bloom to haemophilia centre directors, which Langstaff said “suggested that treatment should continue as before, despite the risks of Aids in addition to hepatitis”.
Because of the huge scale and complexity if criminal investigations relating to the contaminated blood scandal were to start, one option is for policing to establish a national operation to coordinate and help inquiries.
A source said no immediate decisions were expected on police investigations into the tragedy. It is also believed that no individual police force, out of the 43 covering areas in England and Wales, has started its own criminal investigation.
Clive Smith, a criminal barrister and chair at the Haemophilia Society, was sceptical as to whether charges would be brought either in relation to the original treatment failures or the cover-up, but he said it was important that they were.
“I think the evidence needs to be reviewed and considered and, if there is evidence, then people do need to be prosecuted because sadly this report has landed and I doubt there are many – if any – people at home thinking they’re going to get knock on the door from police. I’m afraid until people are actually concerned their consequences have actions we will not see the sort of institutional change Sir Brian has recommended.”
