Welcome back to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 1 June 2026. We now move into our second panel of witnesses as part of today’s compensation scheme hearing, and we have two very eminent witnesses here with us. I would be most grateful if you could introduce yourselves and say what your background is. Ladies first, Shaila—I hope I have the pronunciation of your Christian name right. Is that correct?

Yes, that is perfect, Sir Geoffrey. Thank you.

Good afternoon and welcome.

Good afternoon. My name is Shaila Pal. I am the director, a supervising solicitor and a reader at King’s Legal Clinic, which is part of the law school at King’s College London. For many years I practised as a refugee and human rights solicitor, and for the last 15 years I have been teaching and running pro bono clinics at universities. King’s is part of something known as the Windrush Justice Clinic, which is essentially a group of community organisations and universities that provide pro bono representation to victims of the Windrush scandal. Our Windrush clinic has been running since 2020. Our students work on compensation claims, and I have carried out research on the Windrush compensation scheme and redress schemes more generally. I wrote a report in 2024, which compared the Windrush compensation scheme with the then Horizon shortfall scheme, the Lambeth children’s homes scheme and the infected blood scheme. We have also worked with impacted communities. We did a roundtable report, and more recently, in February 2026, I interviewed some claimant lawyers from the various Post Office schemes and the infected blood scheme to understand their experiences in order to prepare a briefing for the Windrush commissioner by way of a comparison. That is not yet in the public domain, but we hope it will be shortly.

I think you just put it in the public domain.

Oh, yes.

If you do not want it in the public domain, we will have to find a way of getting it out of the transcript.

No, it’s fine—I spoke to Reverend Clive and he is fine. We just haven’t published it yet.

Sir Jonathan, we are very pleased to see you. Would you like to introduce yourself?

I am Jonathan Montgomery. I am professor of healthcare law at the faculty of laws at University College London. I am here primarily because I chaired the expert group about which you heard in the earlier session. It initially started with one group and became a technical expert group when members were added for the third, fourth and possibly fifth set of regulations on the infected blood compensation scheme. I also have experience of sitting on a panel of inquiry into maternal and neonatal deaths in Cumbria and Morecambe bay, but that was not a compensation scheme process. I am primarily here to speak to the design of the infected blood compensation scheme, but I teach more widely on healthcare law and tort law as part of my professional background.

We are very pleased to have both of you. You are obviously extremely well qualified in the subject to give us evidence. It is really good of you to be here. You are busy people—thank you very much for coming.

I can speak particularly from the infected blood experience to the financial elements of compensation, but it is very important to recognise that redress has a number of other elements as well. In the infected blood context, it was clearly far too long before the harms were acknowledged. By the time my group got involved, there was already on the public record a very clear understanding of a range of things that had gone wrong, brought together by Sir Brian Langstaff and Government acknowledgment of the issues. I think there is a divide between those redress schemes and compensation schemes. They need to start with acknowledgment, alongside the type of technical work that my group was asked to do. It would be completely wrong not to have those investigations and acknowledgments as part of the scheme. If we are dealing with the financial elements of a redress scheme—I have written to you, and I hope you have seen it—my reflection on the work that we did is that we were given a relatively technical job of taking an architecture that Sir Brian Langstaff had set out and then trying to work out how to implement it in a bit more detail. That architecture was essentially built on a recognition that there had initially been wrongful action by the NHS. Therefore, the model was a clinical negligence-type compensation scheme, or what lawyers call a personal injury scheme. There was then, overlaid, a whole series of additional wrongs suffered by that community, including being denied that they had been wronged, and a series of first attempts at financial support and compensation that did not go well. The model that we were given was based on the question: if this went to court action, broadly what would the likely financial outcome be? That gave us a series of benchmarks. You heard earlier, for example, about the level of the unethical research award. Sir Robert Francis, in his reflections on the first report my group produced, looked at judicial decisions and came up with the original figure that has now been increased by reference to judicial decisions. So that figure had an explanation. It is very important to recognise that the timing of the explanations of the scheme, the publication of our report, the publication of an explainer by the Cabinet Office, and the announcements about the response to the overall Langstaff inquiry made it impossible for the community to find its way through those explanations. There is a learning point about being really clear what the ask of the compensation scheme is, what it is supposed to achieve, what is flexible and open to discussion, and what is given. When we had the chance, as an expert group, to engage with the community, we saw two things. First, the community produced some very well-reasoned and well-informed improvements to the scheme, some of which we were able to recommend should be picked up. Secondly, there were a number of people who did not think that was the right model for a scheme in the first place. In terms of expectations, it is very important that the community understands what Government are considering and what they are not considering. We would have been much better able to give advice in one go had we been able to discuss that with the community. However, a number of things were raised where we would have said, “That’s outside the scope of the advice we can give,” because they differed from Sir Brian Langstaff's recommendations.

Our terms of reference prevented us from meeting directly with the community. We raised on a number of occasions that that would have been a helpful thing to do. In the second group that I have chaired, we have been able to do that, and we have had a series of roundtables. So that was not a decision that my group took. There is something around pace. I imagine, but you can ask Ministers yourselves, that they were trading off the very long time it took to get started against trying to get some momentum going. We did get access to a lot of information about what the community thought because we were able to see it from evidence to the inquiry. It had engaged with the compensation study that Sir Robert Francis had done a couple of years earlier, and on which Sir Brian Langstaff had reflected in making his recommendations about compensation. There are summaries in that of what the recognised legal representatives suggested about the scheme. We did read all that and take it into account, but that was no substitute for actually having a discussion, because it was secretive and gave rise to suspicion in circumstances where, for very understandable reasons, trust was extremely low. I therefore think it would have been much better to have been able to do that.

We did our best to explain in our reports why we reached the bandings that we did. Those reports were not really read at the time, I think because they came out alongside a Government explainer of the scheme, and the community focus, quite properly, was on, “Well, what has the Government decided to do?”, not why we recommended it. It is also the case that—

I can give you a concrete example, which we explored at some length in the roundtables with the community. In our second piece of work, there was a strong belief in the community that the expert group that I chaired had ignored the psychological impacts of the harm that people had suffered, but we had explained, in summary terms in the first report, that we had assumed that everybody suffered significant psychological damage, so we had not separated out the psychological aspects of what was there. What we had done was to say, in order to try to address some of the points that Kate and others have made about the absence of records, “We need to try to find markers that should be available to people, in terms of evidence.” We thought those would be markers around the impact on liver disease. Then we said to ourselves, “Okay, if people had a chronic hepatitis condition, but it had not progressed further to liver cirrhosis or further still to cancer, what would be the likely range of impacts from that?” We drew that from the evidence taken to the inquiry, so it was about indirectly trying to understand the communities. Then we tried to compare those impacts to the likely awards that courts would make. Those are not made up of a sort of checklist—“You get x amount for this bit of your injury and y amount for the psychological impact.” They are much more holistic than that. We made our best effort to identify those and match them. Those variations are relatively small parts of the overall awards; the large driver for awards is the impact on people’s ability to earn and on their need for paid care support. We also aimed to extrapolate, in relation to each of those severity bands, what it was likely that people who had those conditions would have needed in terms of care, and the likely impact on their earning potential. Those inferences about the rough proportion of earning capacity that would have been lost have broadly stood up, even after the further engagement. That enabled us to produce a tariff approach to financial loss. The frustrating thing is our inability to communicate that. You will have heard about the calculator, which provides a relatively straightforward way for people to get a ballpark figure of what the compensation is likely to look like. That is driven by all those judgments and recommendations. However, those recommendations also drove a completely opaque set of legal regulations that even I find it hard to work out whether they actually implement—

The legislative structure that was created established an authority and regulations. We were advised that it would take the recommendations, which we aimed to write in a way that would be understood by the community, into a set of powers, obligations and duties for the authority. This is the discretion point that is there.

I do not think it is wrong for the Government to say what a likely court event outcome would be. That is a reasonable legalistic benchmark. The constitutional law requirements and the lack of discretion have become unduly legalistic.

If you had already had in place a redress authority, then the constitutional law requirements about how many tiers down you can delegate discretion would have been much less complex. The regulations would have been much simpler and would have looked much more like—

Because a new body was set up to which Parliament then delegated powers. My understanding of what we were briefed on was that you have constitutional law problems about how much discretion you can create. However, if you already had an authority with the power to create a scheme, it would have been much less constrained and would not have had to create the same level of regulation. That was the briefing that we were given.

Would become much less legalistic. Catherine McKinnell It would be administrated differently. That is helpful, thank you.

Shaila, may I turn to you and ask what lessons has your work identified about the operation and administration of compensation schemes?

Our work and my research has found that what supports fair and effective decision making is having an independent decision maker. My research has very much focused on the Windrush compensation scheme, and that is administered by the Home Office, which is the perpetrator of the harm. I can go into a bit more detail and talk about some of the Post Office schemes, because they are a bit hybrid, as I call them; they are not pure Post Office. I think it is about having an independent decision maker, and for it to have appropriate experts available to advise on eligibility where it is needed. Sometimes eligibility—getting into the scheme—is not necessarily complex, although it is complex in Windrush. It is also about the amount of loss or harm that has been suffered. I will caveat that by saying that the second part depends on whether you go down a fixed-sum route or an assessment route. I want to talk about that, because it is an interesting proposition that should be considered in any scheme. The Infected Blood Compensation Authority is a better example because it is an arm’s length body. From the National Audit Office Report that I read, I think the satisfaction rates are higher than for all the other schemes that I have looked at, particularly the Windrush scheme. The way that the infected blood compensation scheme works is that you have a case manager who is assigned. It is interesting that the case manager is a non-lawyer. That is relevant to mention because in all the schemes, the first decision maker is a non-lawyer. Thereafter, that case manager works very closely with the affected person. The difficulty, though, is that the standard of proof applied in the infected blood scheme and other schemes is the balance of probabilities, but because you have an independent decision maker and there is funded legal advice, our recent research has found that there is a sort of negotiation process in understanding what the level of loss is. For example, with that process—the independence and having the buffer of the funded legal representative—our recent research found that most lawyers said that they were not taking cases to what we call an internal review, and very few had proceeded to a tribunal hearing. The scheme is quite new in comparison; it only started in October 2024. That independence and having a lawyer navigate what is a complex legal system and standard of proof—I want to get to that, because I think it is a problem across all the schemes—is in stark contrast to the Windrush compensation scheme, which is administered by the Home Office and where there is no effective provision for expert evidence. In the infected blood scheme, the case manager can consult an expert, usually a medical expert, to assist, if eligibility is an issue, on loss; the claimant lawyer co-operates with the case manager to put questions in terms of the evidence that is gathered. There is no provision of expert evidence in the Windrush scheme. Technically there is, but we are not aware of the Home Office ever having funded any expert evidence. Essentially, what you have is quite an adversarial system. One of the key things is that whoever administers it must be independent, and we need to move away from these adversarial principles in all the schemes. I can talk about what I mean by that, with particular reference to the levels of evidence that all the schemes have.

I was going to ask you to follow up on the evidence point. Can I ask you to keep talking, basically?

Essentially, the Windrush compensation scheme, the infected blood scheme and all the Post Office schemes—those are the ones I am familiar with—have something known as the balance of probabilities. It is a civil standard. You could equate it to having to prove your case and provide evidence to around a 50% probability. That is obviously an adversarial concept. In all the schemes, particularly in Windrush, which I am very familiar with, the guidance provides for a softening of that test, because it acknowledges the historical nature of the harm, the difficulties in gathering evidence and so on. But the reality according to lots of reports that have been written about Windrush—my report, the JUSTICE reports and the recent research that I did with claimant lawyers—is that the majority of the decision makers in all these schemes are not lawyers, so they do not necessarily understand the softer balance of responsibilities, as I call it. The challenge is that there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, and there are elevated evidential standards, so it is complex. I think there is a way you can simplify it. There is a real question mark—now I have reflected on all the schemes—about whether it should be a balance of probabilities. You could have a lower standard. There is something known as a reasonable degree of likelihood. You could introduce some of the concepts that the earlier panel were talking about, such as reverse burdens, but there are ways to simplify it and ways for the standard of proof to actually reflect the fact that all these cohorts are victims of historical harm—harm that has been committed by the state. In each of these schemes, the state has destroyed the evidence, whether it is through negligence or on purpose, so I think that framework is very problematic. The flip side of that is that all the claimant lawyers, who are used to litigating traditional damages claims, said there is a real difficulty in understanding some of the nuances of that threshold. It makes the process more problematic and, in a way, litigious. Certainly, with the Windrush compensation scheme, that has been the case. There is an elevated standard of proof without a lawyer because there is no funded legal representation for victims of the Windrush scandal. In my experience, it is virtually impossible to succeed. There is a lot of evidence. JUSTICE did a report that looked at the difference between when somebody has a lawyer and when they do not. Without a lawyer, someone might, for example, recover £11,000, while the average increase was usually eight times that—around £80,000. You have a complex scheme, which means that you really do need a lawyer, and if you do not have a lawyer, it is essentially inaccessible.

That is really helpful. Thank you very much.

Shaila, could you please walk us through how Departments can better encourage and support claimants to come forward to claim for compensation they think they are entitled to?

If it helps, I can summarise the methodologies that some of the schemes have used. For the Post Office and the infected blood compensation schemes, one of the main methodologies was contacting the potential claimants. That is a good method to some extent for those schemes because the eligible cohort was more readily identifiable, but obviously there are difficulties with that—people may not respond to the authorities because of fear, and so forth. The Infected Blood Compensation Authority also worked with impacted communities to do outreach events together. They went out there together, which is a good option if those organisations have the trust of those communities. With the Windrush compensation scheme, it is a little more complex. The Home Office did not do that kind of official outreach. Could that have been possible? Potentially, yes. There are documents that we have come across when preparing claims in which it is clear that the Home Office at some stage has identified that this person might be part of that cohort. As to whether it is a bigger cohort, it probably ranges between 30,000 to 50,000, if you are being very generous, which is similar to infected blood. What has been utilised, although it has not been completely effective, is community organisations. The community fund enables community organisations to promote the scheme. The problem for the Windrush compensation scheme is twofold. The community organisations have had some success, but their success has been limited by the fact that there is inherent distrust in the Windrush compensation scheme. Even if a trusted person goes out and tells someone to apply to the scheme, there are already barriers. We have, I think, a 39% success rate—a very high refusal rate—and that is known in the community. People are still fearful, so the success of outreach is hinged on, “Are you running the scheme well and have you got good engagement with your community?”

Sorry to stop you mid-flow, but is part of the problem, in some cases, the lack of independence? In this case, the Home Office, which essentially caused the original harm, is very much involved in the compensation process.

Yes, it is that, and also—

Sorry, but to build on that, is the independence issue one that needs to be resolved in all examples? Is that a fundamental issue in the establishment and the set-up of these compensation schemes?

Yes, absolutely. We did a roundtable with victims from different schemes and the independence point is fundamental. The perpetrator of the harm, from their perspective, should not be administering it, for all those reasons. There is an inherent fear. For example, with the Windrush compensation scheme the Home Office is still an immigration enforcement centre. People are not even sure if they have status, so the likelihood of them coming forward is reduced. I want to make a more practical point. I definitely think there needs to be trust and it needs to be independent, but in terms of community organisations going out there and promoting the scheme, that needs to be done quite carefully. One point, which is in the National Audit Office Report, is that the scheme was promoted through a social media campaign and the eligibility requirements were not clearly articulated. The thing about Windrush is that it is a complex scheme when it comes to eligibility, and we have found that in our Windrush justice clinic. To ensure that people are being given the correct information and that eligibility is correctly assessed, we work in partnership with our community partners. For example, we will train them on the eligibility requirements. When they go and do outreach, it will not necessarily be a Windrush compensation scheme event. They will go to an event, which is based in a church, on something else and they will talk about the Windrush compensation scheme. Then the lawyers who are part of the Windrush justice clinic—lawyers from Southwark Law Centre or North Kensington Law Centre—will go and talk about eligibility. We have quite a careful triage process. I am all for community organisations being at the forefront of that work, but where eligibility is more complex, there needs to be a good partnership with the legal experts. That is the model that the Windrush justice clinic uses because of some of those issues around eligibility.

Building on that independence issue, in the earlier panel we heard about the LGBT financial recognition scheme, which is administered by the MOD. So that is a similar situation. Those potential claimants are really difficult to find. I guess there is potentially a similarity there with the Windrush claims—I do not know; you are the expert on that. In this particular scheme, we are six months out from it ending and the MOD has only just decided to allocate some money to another party to go out and try and advertise. When Departments are doing that, what trust can people really have in these compensation schemes? How credible are they really? Is there a risk that Departments are doing the bare minimum because they do not want to pay out?

Unfortunately, that is the impression that the many different survivors from the different schemes do have. It is an understandable narrative; sometimes it is also a true narrative. Going back to, I think, the first question about when you design these schemes—the earlier panel mentioned this—it is critically important that you involve the impacted communities. Those impacted communities also need to be supported to engage in what can be a legal process, although I think that we need to move away from having a legal process that is similar to a damages claim—I do not think it should be like that. There are some examples where that has been effective, comparatively. For example, in the Lambeth children’s homes redress scheme, there was funded legal advice for the Shirley Oaks Survivors Association to engage in the design of the scheme. That was partly effective, in that the majority of compensation claims were paid, but there were criticisms from the victims about the awards. I appreciate that there have been criticisms of the tail end of what happened with the infected blood schemes, but comparatively, the approach there is quite a model approach in comparison with, for example, the Post Office schemes, and certainly the Windrush compensation scheme. I think that early trust can be very easily lost, and I will give a quick example. In 2019 the Government conducted a public consultation on developing the Windrush compensation scheme, but there was no funding for the impacted communities, even though they did contribute. I know people who contributed to that consultation, and they just did not feel heard at all. It is quite important to build in some mechanism so that those views have an element of—I want to say teeth, essentially. What has been better is, for example, the views of victims when there is a public inquiry that is seen to carry greater weight, particularly in relation to the Windrush compensation scheme. The impacted communities feel that small wins have been made, but the really important things have not changed, so that accountability mechanism for the views of victims needs to be proportionately built into the design of this independent scheme somehow. A public inquiry is desirable, and I think there is a reason for that. When the scandals broke in both the Post Office schemes, and I think the Windrush compensation scheme—following the litigation in the Post Office schemes, and following the 2018 revelations—the Government understandably wanted to move quickly to set up a scheme. While I think it is important that schemes are set up swiftly, I also think that both Windrush and the Post Office are examples of where more time should have been taken to consider the nature of the loss that people suffered and to consult with victims in more depth, so that you can design a scheme that may consider whether we should have two routes—where one is a fixed payment and the other is assessed. The difficulty is that, once the initial trust is lost, it is quite difficult to get it back from the community. I suppose it is about balancing the time that you spend on planning. The infected blood scheme introduced some quite useful measures, such as the degree of consultation and interim payments, as they did not wait until the end of the public inquiry for those interim payments to be set up. Also, I know there are criticisms of the test-and-learn approach, and maybe that can be scaled up, but I think there are actually some benefits, as you can at least start with some. With all the schemes that I have looked at, they are improved throughout, and I think we would want that. We can take learning from all these things, but all the schemes are quite unique in the types of loss and the types of evidence, so the test-and-learn approach should be scaled up, and it is a valuable approach. When combined with consulting impacted communities on the approach, it can be very valuable.

This question is for the both of you. What recommendations or changes would you make to the Government’s approach to the planning and operation of future compensation schemes? This is where I get tested: I have heard that you want an independent authority for the structure; a non-legal caseworker to help the claimant; not having the perpetrator manage the scheme; good legal and non-legal partnership working; that the design should be co-produced with the affected community; and that a public inquiry is a desirable as an ideal starting point. Are there other recommendations that you would make?

I do not think we want necessarily to say that there should always be a public inquiry. There must be some public investigation, but the Government should not wait if they know that compensation should be given. One of the things about the infected blood compensation scheme that does not quite come across in the NAO Report is the number of false starts that were made. Sir Brian Langstaff goes through the various ways that the Alliance House schemes failed to do the job effectively. It should not be necessary to have a public inquiry to acknowledge fault, so I do not think you should make that a prerequisite, but I do think it is a prerequisite that there is clear acknowledgment of fault and an explanation of the compensation consequences of that. The more detailed design work, which I agree needs to be co-produced, cannot really work without an understanding of what the aims, objectives and some of the parameters are.

Evidential burdens should be simplified. I recommend moving away from the balance of probabilities threshold to a lower standard of proof. Being a former refugee lawyer, I am thinking something more akin to reasonable degree of likelihood or introducing elements of the reverse burden that we see in some of the schemes in the Report. There need to be bespoke support services for victims as well. I think this was discussed by the previous panel. The only schemes that have specific psychological support are the infected blood schemes. The others do not, and it is important that people are able to access that support. Impacted communities have raised that with me a number of times. The other point is that victims want compensation swiftly, and they want an apology as well. The apology on its own is redundant, or inadequate compensation, particularly for the Windrush compensation scheme. There should be funded legal advice for all victims. Again, there is a lot of literature on the benefits of funded legal advice in relation to the wellbeing of victims, and it helps decision making as well.

Great. Thank you very much.

Let us turn to the provision of legal advice for all claimants. Paragraph 1.11 on page 19 of the NAO Report states that the Home Office “increased the number of caseworkers by around 20 and invested in training. By…2025, the backlog was reduced to 595 cases in progress”. The Report goes on to state that the Home Office adopted “a single caseworker approach under which each claimant has a single point of contact throughout their claims process.” Is it necessary in the first instance to have legal advice, or is a simple caseworker, albeit trained, a good start?

I would say that funded legal advice from the outset can help to speed up the process and front-load the case. The reason why is that, ideally, you would want a less complex, appropriately legalistic system, and the challenge is that even with the Infected Blood Compensation Authority, which runs one of the better schemes, there were still challenges with understanding, and for victims there is still fear and concern, even though it is an independent body. There is also academic literature that talks about the wellbeing benefits of having a lawyer—having a buffer—for talking about things that are inherently traumatic. So I would say yes, from the outset it is necessary. I want to talk about, if time permits, one example of where having a lawyer is very beneficial even where you have a fixed-sum scheme. In relation to the Horizon convictions redress scheme, the claimant can either accept the £600,000 payment or have their claim assessed. Funding is available for legal advice for them to decide which route they should take. It was very interesting, when we interviewed lawyers who advise on that scheme—they would advise someone on whether they should take the £600,000 or whether their claim was worth more—that even when victims’ claims were potentially worth more, they were still going down the £600,000 route. It is very important—I think Sir Alan referred to this—that someone has that legal advice so that they understand all their options and the best thing for them to do. They are very highly traumatised. In terms of whether they are making the right decision for themselves, the lawyer assists them in navigating that process in a way that I do not think even an independent case manager can do. In my experience of working on Windrush claims, as well as just generally advising the public about navigating various legal processes, it is really quite overwhelming, even for a quite sophisticated or educated member of the public. That is my view.

Sir Jonathan, do you have any comments on that?

Access to independent advice and support is crucial. I am not persuaded that you could not design a scheme that would not require it to come from lawyers. Had we not had in the regulations those technicalities we were discussing earlier, I hope we would have designed that. The key thing I would say is that there is a question about who is trusted and where the funding should go. We were very worried about creating a compensation industry, whereby people who really didn’t have any relationship with this community would suddenly see an opportunity to tout their wares. You would avoid that if you routed the funds for legal advice and support through the trusted communities. My preference, I think, would be to recognise the need for independent support and advice and to take advice from the communities about whether that should be specifically badged as from lawyers or could be done differently. But it would clearly need to make sure that it included sufficient funding for legal advice to be given. I would not want to specify that it is always legal advice; I would want to specify that the community needs access to independent advice that is funded as part of the scheme.

This is the final question for both of you. Obviously, we have been genuinely interested this afternoon in the existing schemes, but one of our main tasks is to try to come up with some recommendations for future schemes. Unfortunately, future mistakes will be made by the state, and compensation will need to be paid. I am wondering what advice you have for us on designing those schemes. On the issue of trust in particular, I am wondering about taking the matter away from the lead Ministry that actually caused the problem in the first place—with Windrush, it was the Home Office—and whether there could be a permanent Government body, a standing delivery authority, perhaps to deliver but perhaps also to advise on the design.

I think it should be possible to create a broad typology for the types of schemes that are required. Some have to just acknowledge and recognise the loss, and a lump sum payment may be what is appropriate there. There are some where victims have major needs and those needs need to be addressed, and there is then a question of the interaction between other welfare and support processes. There are some schemes where, as with the infected blood inquiry, you are trying to mimic a court process, because it is very clear that people have been damaged in a way that would usually attract personal injury claims and they should not have to go through the treadmill to deal with that. The first task would be whether you could, with the experienced communities from previous schemes, identify not quite off-the-shelf schemes but a set of issues that Ministers could have as a blueprint and say, “We are asking for a scheme of broadly this type,” and then you would be able to co-design with the relevant communities. The second thing is that we worked hard to set out our approach to evidence. We were given the balance of probabilities from the inquiry, but we decided that you should only ask for evidence that is likely to be there, and that would actually answer a question that would change the compensation that is there. Because it is public money, you need some sense of verifying ability, and you need to be really clear that you should only ask people to come up with things that are proportionate to the need for compensation. They might not be precisely right, but I think a redress commissioner or body would be able to go to communities and say, “We have a starting point that says that these are the approaches to what is required of evidence,” and that could include the point you have heard about the onus and burden of proof. I would have thought you could create a structure that would not take away from the communities their ability to do detailed design, but could be more realistic about the scope of that work and get it targeted, and not raise expectations in an unrealistic way. If all that is in place, it should be possible to do the work a lot more quickly. That would be my sense.

What would be the order of this? This body would look at it and come up with a design. It has to have some statutory underpinning of some sort, so would it make recommendations to the Department—the Minister?

My sense of the ordering is that a scandal of some sort emerges, and it becomes apparent that the Government needs to respond to that. It would be able to go to a standing redress commissioner and ask about the range of options that it might consider, but it would need a democratic mandate to actually commission the work. That commission would require the redress commissioner to work with the relevant communities to do the detailed design work, but you would expect Ministers to say, “We can see that these people need their needs supported or they need recognition for the wrongs they have suffered.” There would be a broad typology of the ask being of a particular nature. That would give us the ability to get quite quick answers about the shape of a scheme, because most of these communities have a pretty good sense of what redress needs to look like. I think you would need to keep the democratic commission, but you would need an option available to say, “There is a limited range of approaches to this,” and Ministers would need to say, “This is the type of approach that you should set off on.”

I will come to Shaila in a minute, but I have one further question. I do not know whether you heard the previous session, when Blake, who has had to go into the Chamber, referred to this. There is a cut-off date of 12 December this year, so six months away. Do you think a Government should have a cut-off date like that? Is it wrong to have too tight a cut-off date?

That was the MOD scheme.

Yes.

Not the blood scheme.

No.

If it were the blood inquiry, there would come a point where the investment in the volume of case managers is not justified by the number of claims coming through, but I do not think you would have a cut-off that stopped people claiming; you would need a legacy scheme. Again, if you had a redress commissioner, you would have somewhere where a scheme could be deposited for legacy claims that have been missed. On whether a cut-off is a plausible thing to do, my view is that it depends on whether you are confident that there is sufficient awareness. I think you are seeing David Foley later in the week. There seems to be a reduction in the number of people now registering with the intention to claim for the blood inquiry. That might give a bit of a measure of what proportion of the people the modelling suggests ought to be able to claim are likely to claim. We then need to ask whether there are people who do not know they could claim, and whether there are people who know but do not wish to do that. It is reasonable to come to a point at which you wind down the infrastructure, but you should not put down a guillotine and say that people who would be eligible can no longer claim.

That is very helpful. The last word is yours, Shaila.

Sir Geoffrey, if it helps, many of the schemes that I looked at had a cut-off point, and it was always extended. I do not know how pragmatic that is. I do not know whether it is about fiscal planning—there are planning assumptions and allocated budgets. I do not have anything in particular to add. I concur with Sir Jonathan’s comments. I do not know whether he made this exact point, but I think there should be an independent standing body to devise these schemes, and they should be set up with an interdisciplinary expert panel. The impacted communities—our term at King’s is “experts by experience”—should be on that group. There should also be an advisory group made up of other experts, including impacted communities from other redress schemes. As we saw from the previous panel, there is sadly a great deal of learning and knowledge from those individuals. I do not have anything further to add; I agree with all the points Sir Jonathan made.

Does the Committee have any further questions? If not, I thank you both very much. You have given us some very valuable evidence. The previous panel was the nuts and bolts, and you are how we build the building. It has been very valuable. As you know—Sir Jonathan referred to this—we will have the permanent secretaries in on Thursday to give us further evidence on what we have heard. Thank you both. You are very busy people. An uncorrected version of the transcript will be available in the next few days if you wish to make any changes. We will produce a report, having heard all the panels’ evidence, in due course. I hope you will look at that and let us have your comments; that would be really valuable. Again, I am very grateful for your contribution this afternoon.