Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 1 June. Today marks the start of our compensation week, when we are taking the unusual step of dedicating two separate evidence sessions to examine the Government’s administration of compensation schemes to highlight the importance of the issue. Based on the NAO’s Report on the subject, we will examine the operational performance of seven schemes, including Windrush, LBGT financial recognition and infected blood, as well as four separate schemes within the Post Office Horizon scheme. Across the seven schemes, as of February 2026, the Government have paid about £3.5 billion, with an estimated further £11.4 billion potentially still to be paid. Today, we are joined by a cast of witnesses with a wealth of experience of some of the compensation schemes. Our session this afternoon is split between two panels. On Thursday, we will hear from senior Government officials. This afternoon, we look to hear from our witnesses about compensation scheme design, engagement, support for claimants, and recommendations for change. We have an important and experienced team first this afternoon. I ask each of you to introduce yourself, starting with you, Reverend Clive. How would you like us to address you?

Reverend Clive is fine. I am the independent Windrush Commissioner. My role is to act as a trusted voice for those people who have been harmed by the Home Office Windrush scandal, to scrutinise the Government and hold them to account, and to advise with regard to some of the Wendy Williams review.

Great to see you. Thank you for coming.

Hello. I am Sir Alan Bates. I led the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, which exposed the Post Office scandal after all these years. Even though nowadays I have stepped back from things, I thought it was important to attend this Public Accounts Committee session. I thought it was well worth doing.

We are very pleased to see you, thank you. Peter, you are a former colleague.

Indeed. My name is Peter Gibson, and I am at present the chief executive of Fighting with Pride, the LGBTQ+ military charity that has campaigned on behalf of veterans impacted by the LGBT ban between 1967 and 2000. We supported Lord Etherton in his report leading up to the Government’s apology in 2023, and we represent and support many veterans who have applied under the scheme.

It is very good to see you again. Finally, and by no means least, Kate.

I am Kate Burt, the chief executive at the Haemophilia Society. I am here to represent the more than 6,000 people with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders who were infected with HIV and hepatitis viruses through contaminated blood in the 1970s and 1980s. Over 3,000 of our community have died, and it is estimated that 30,000 people were infected in total. I am here to represent them all.

We are very pleased to see all of you and thank you again for coming.

Good afternoon. This question is for each of you, because your experiences may be different depending on your groups. How confident are affected groups that the compensation schemes will deliver outcomes that are proportionate and just?

Proportionate and just is difficult to define, given that so many of our community were exposed to multiple harms. Indeed, many people, including children, were subject to non-consensual and experimental testing. The harm that was done to them, the lives that have been lost, the children who have lost parents, the parents who have lost children, and the devastation to the people in the bleeding disorders community is very hard to quantify. Although our compensation scheme, compared with some of the others, might appear to be extremely generous, is it proportionate to the harm that was done over 40 years—not just the infections that were suffered, but the continual denial by Governments of every political hue that this had happened? As Sir Brian Langstaff said on the 20th May 2024, “This was not an accident”. It could have been avoided.

At the moment, trust is still very fragile, and people feel like they have to fight the state all over again. Currently, we are seeing a high number of nil awards. Out of 100 claims, 56 result in a nil award. That is damaging confidence in the scheme, and it is critical to understand that. Combined with the trust element, the outcomes where 56% are not getting a positive outcome is very concerning. My office is looking to do an independent review so we can understand why that is happening and what needs to be done to fix it. There is still an amount of emotional pain and people feel that the engagement with the forms is complex. That is damaging trust.

Post Office schemes are often described as compensation, whereas the GLO scheme, something that I went through, was meant to be a financial redress scheme, which included a proportion of compensation. It was meant to put people back in a position that they would have been in had the Post Office not done to them what it did. I know “compensation” sort of wraps it up; it has become the common way of describing it. Any comments I make today are very much my own views, but they are also based on my experience of being a victim and leading the group over all these years. If you asked me what I think about the compensation scheme and those that have been involved for the Post Office, I would have to say they were an utter disaster, to be quite frank. There are so many reasons why they were wrong and why they have caused so much grief, even now.

The first thing to say is that our scheme is not a compensation scheme. The sums involved for our LGBT veterans are considerably smaller than any other scheme’s. When we look back at it, I think it was accelerated because it was fairly straightforward. That has not necessarily been borne out in terms of the trust that has been experienced by veterans. They were promised 18-week updates at the launch of the scheme, and those did not happen. The computer system that the MOD was using failed to materialise for nine months after the scheme started, and those delays, compounded by the delays to the appointment of the impact panel, compounded by the delays to the setting up of the further impact panel to accelerate delivery, which took the Ministry of Defence from September up until 18 May to finally announce, has led to a great deal of distrust in the system. A number of our veterans who were effectively forced to resign are not included in the scheme, and that has led to some veterans taking a judicial review to challenge the scheme. What I personally cannot convey to you is the whole retraumatising effect on our very damaged veterans who experienced not only the loss of their jobs, but the loss of their careers and their pensions, and the horror of being outed to their families by the military. That has had such long-tail consequences that it has taken in some instances up to 60 years to receive any settlement. So my answer is no, I do not believe it is proportionate, and I do not believe it is just.

Thank you. You have largely pre-empted my next question, which is about trust. I am definitely getting the sense that there is not a feeling of trust in these schemes. Kate, you did not specifically mention that, but would you say the same thing or is there a greater level of trust?

The compensation scheme was fundamentally undermined by the fact that up until 20 May 2024, when the infected blood inquiry report was published, the Government consistently refused to engage with us and with any of the other charities or campaign groups, saying that they must wait for the inquiry report to be published, yet less than 24 hours later, they announced in the House a compensation scheme as a fait accompli. They had clearly been working on it for months. I know Professor Sir John Montgomery is also giving evidence today. Why did he let the expert group meet behind closed doors in secret, so that when the compensation scheme was announced less than 24 hours after the total vindication of Sir Brian’s report, it caused devastation? No, there is no trust.

Thank you for that detail. Finally, from the perspective of now, are the schemes that each of you are concerned with doing enough to improve the claimants’ trust?

The Infected Blood Compensation Authority are trying to engage with the community, but are they listening? I’m not so sure. We are really concerned that the claim system seems to have completely stalled. They have over 350 claim managers based in Newcastle, and at the moment we estimate there are probably 30 to 40 live claims. So what is going on? They are obsessed with test and learn. Many of the living infected who were already recognised on support schemes have received their compensation, which is really encouraging. But for the living infected and never compensated, and the estates of those who died and those who were affected, which could be tens of thousands of family members, we have no idea when their claims will be opened, and it is just not good enough. IBCA has a budget of £171 million a year; it needs to spend and spend, and it needs to get the claims through for people whose cases are quite straightforward because the evidence is there. It is refusing to do that because it wants to create a perfect system, so that everybody’s cases can ramp up, but we just do not understand what it is doing.

There have been some improvements in the scheme since the beginning, but more change needs to happen, as it is still not working for the communities and the people it was designed for. On the timeliness, back in 2020 you were waiting up to 14 months to get a result on a claim; now, in 2025, we are now down to four months. As the commissioner, I made a number of recommendations to improve the scheme, which included advance payments of up to 75% for those in a review, and the compensation for pensions that had been lost. That was a massively important step. It is also important to understand that priority should be given to older claimants, those who are 75 or more and vulnerable. All these steps are really important, but they are incremental. What we want to see is some more fundamental change. It was really important that those changes were made, because the delays in particular were totally unacceptable—that is, how long people were waiting to get justice. However, it is important the Government realise that the job is still not complete.

Before we move on to Sir Alan, I was not entirely clear about what you said. You said it was important for the changes you have announced to be made, but I think you then said that fundamental change is still needed. Is that the case? If so, what is it?

I am really concerned that people are telling me they need some level of support, and this support is leading to what we call funded legal support. People find the process complex, overwhelming and confusing. I am hearing from people that funded legal support would be of benefit, and I think it would also help in the reviews, which are very costly. Advocates are doing a great job, but they do not do the work that lawyers can bring.

Thank you very much; sorry to interrupt.

From talking to the others earlier, I think there is a fundamental problem with all these schemes: the fact that Government should not be involved with them. That is the biggest mistake with the whole thing, as the civil service just grinds them into the ground. I will give you a perfect example. In the GLO scheme that I was involved with, the Minister announced that there would be a compensation scheme—or a financial redress scheme—in March 2022. It was meant to be completed by August 2024, and that was the deadline that was set. However, they did not even launch the scheme until a year later, and the first thing the Department did was get rid of the deadline, saying, “Well, we don’t want to hinder anybody. We want to make sure that people have plenty of time.” They did that instead of working to a realistic timescale and actually getting the job done. It got bogged down by that, and I think that has been the big problem. It has to be an independent body, but Government have to be involved at the highest level, and they probably have to fund it—in our case, until the real guilty ones also cough up towards it. As I say, it has to have involvement and funding from Government, but it has to be an independent body, and there is a whole number of ways to achieve that.

We will probably come on to that, because it is fundamentally important.

I want to say a number of things. There has been some improving trust on a number of levels, and I have personally had very good personal, direct engagement with the civil servants running the scheme. That has been welcomed by us and, I believe, by them. They have listened. They accepted our advice to add financial challenges for some claimants to the list of criteria for accelerated payment, alongside the terminally ill, which was welcomed. On the transparency of the progress of the scheme, the Ministry of Defence’s website publishes stats on a monthly basis. It took us nine months to get it to do that—it went into development. If you look at those stats now, they are so opaque in terms of the progression of each of the respective schemes. They do not tell you that the discharge or dismissal payment scheme is almost at 97% of payments. It clearly does not tell you that the impact payment scheme is still sub 50% in terms of settlement. There is a level of opaqueness about that transparency, which breeds distrust. From the very start of the scheme, we were concerned as an organisation that the Government were not putting enough into advertising, marketing and promoting it. The Ministry of Defence does not have a list of all eligible LGBT veterans. Nobody has that list, because of previously destroyed records and a lack of information being held. I spent almost a year lobbying to get further funding to do more marketing, promotion and advertising to find those lost LGBT veterans. The Ministry of Defence has now finally awarded a contract for £60,000 to a company—18 months after the scheme started and six months before it finishes. I have no axe to grind with the organisation appointed, but they reached out to us because we have the expert knowledge in respect of finding LGBT veterans. In my view, that money would have been better given to us as an organisation to help find them a year ago. The trust is there in some respects. There has been some listening. I am still awaiting replies to various pieces of correspondence to Government Ministers in the Ministry of Defence. They have met with me on multiple occasions, and I have welcomed those meetings. I have left memos. I have written follow-up letters. Those have not all been responded to. The very fact that some of our veterans have had to launch a judicial review tells you all you need to know about complete trust in the scheme.

Thank you very much indeed.

It is critical to have the people who were affected the most in the room to be a part of that design; I would like the Committee to be aware of that going forward. A big area is around trust. In principle, I do not think that having the Department that caused the harm then administering the justice will be helpful in building that trust from the onset. That level of independence is crucial in terms of the design and the flaws. Co-design with the people who have been most affected is essential from the onset when designing the scheme.

In fairness, I think the GLO scheme has started quite well. The officials seem willing to listen to us and to our lawyers, who have spent a lot of time fighting the Post Office on our behalf. They did take on board a lot of the points—or, I should say, they listened to a lot of our points—but the scheme that came out at the end seemed so different. We were assured that it was going to be non-legalistic and all the rest of it, but it has got bogged down in lawyers and so on. It seemed that the first thing the Department did was to go out and hire a very expensive firm of lawyers to put the scheme together, which is mad, because they obviously did not have the experience to do those things. That is why I am saying—and I will come back to this time and time again, Chair—that there needs to be an independent organisation that does not reinvent the wheel every time for every different situation, so that there is some commonality in there. As Reverend Clive just said, the victims and their legal representatives have to be involved from the outset in the design of any scheme and any appeals process in there, so that everyone has a stake in it working out.

On the design of the Windrush scheme, the Government are saying that you do not need representation, but the evidence tells us that, for people who are going through the process, it is very complex. I am sorry, but other schemes are legally funded. The Windrush generation and those going through the scheme face some very complicated problems, and they require a legal mind to support them. If other schemes can have that legal funding, why cannot Windrush? I welcome the advocacy support fund, but that is not enough. Legal support can provide the challenge to flawed decisions, which people find overwhelming and complicated, given the level of evidence required. All those things point towards funded expert legal support. Again, that will help by enabling us to bring down costly reviews as well. We are hearing and seeing this. My office is putting that to Ministers now; we will be looking at how we can present the cost-benefit to Ministers. Even the JUSTICE report says that, with the engagement of funded lawyers, we would get better outcomes for people going through the claims process.

I agree with the point that you raised: it needs to be simplified—it has got so legalistic. As I said, the Department went away and hired a big firm of lawyers to put the whole scheme together, but the minute they do that, they turn it into this enormously complex and threatening thing for the victims, who then need their own lawyers to start getting in there. Then you have lawyers against lawyers, it goes on and on, and it costs millions to do every time. So, yes, I fully agree. Most victims just want a fair outcome. They do not want to go through all this time and time again; they want to move on.

When you were speaking, Reverend Clive, I was wondering whether for schemes like yours—the same goes for Kate—where events happened such a long time ago and the records were often pretty minimal, it is even more important to have legal representation to try and gather the evidence together. Is that correct, or is it nonsense?

That is correct, Chair. I would really emphasise that it was the state that, in many ways, caused the records not to be available, and people have then been asked to provide those records. In my experience of supporting and working with people, you will tend to find that those who get an outcome have worked very closely with an experienced advocate or have had lawyers or legal support to get that outcome. It is proving to be more complicated and complex than the initial design would lead us to think.

Kate, with your scheme, these things happened to many people far too long ago, and presumably a lot of the records are not there. That must be a problem?

Yes, in many cases medical records were missing or destroyed. When the Infected Blood Compensation Authority was set up—I absolutely take the point that they are a passionate and dedicated body of people—it inherited a deeply flawed scheme that was designed without the expert input of the community. The legal representatives, throughout the inquiry, fought to have a place in advising the community. We have legal representation, financial advisers and psychological support, which is a sign of how much damage was done. I do not believe that the other schemes have any of those things and that does not seem to be consistent or fair.

My questions are for Peter and Kate in relation to the LGBT financial recognition scheme and the infected blood compensation scheme respectively. We have heard a lot of the issues and challenges from the other schemes. It would be really helpful for me if each of you could unpack the comparisons and compare and contrast. Have lessons been learned, or are your schemes suffering the same challenges that earlier schemes have suffered? Peter, perhaps you could kick off because at the start of the session you gave a useful list of all the challenges.

Forgive me for not being across the detail of the other three schemes. I think that, of all the schemes represented before you today, ours is probably the simplest and has probably been administered in the fastest possible timescale. It is important that the Committee realises that our scheme closes on 12 December this year. If an LGBT veteran rocks up at our door just before Christmas seeking their reparations for their mistreatment between 1967 and 2000, the door is shut and they will get nothing. So there is an impetus behind the urgency with which we believe things should have been addressed by the scheme, because of that timescale. Regarding the scheme overall, it is a relatively simple and straightforward scheme. However, many of our veterans are in their 80s; we have even had some in their 90s who were impacted by this ban. They are not technologically proficient. We have had to send some of our support workers to sit down, face to face, in veterans’ homes and spend a day with them writing out their testimony on paper, so that they are able to submit it, because they cannot submit it through an online portal. They have been retraumatised by the process; it is a painful and hard process. It is also important to note that there is no provision for any legal representation in our scheme whatsoever. I think the majority of our veterans have been able to navigate it with our support and without legal support. However, for some—particularly those who are more elderly, more vulnerable or significantly mentally traumatised by their experiences—the legal support they have been able to secure through the help we have been able to negotiate with firms on either a reduced or pro bono basis, has been remarkably beneficial. Echoing what everybody else has said with regard to their schemes, every single one of these compensation or recognition schemes should, in the future, provide free, independent advice for applicants. Some of our LGBT veterans are having to dip into the very small sums of money that they are recovering to pay lawyers—albeit on a reduced rate—for their help and advice. That is not fair, that is not equitable and that is not just.

I do not think lessons have been learned from earlier schemes. As I said in my opening remarks, we found out on 21 May 2024 that the Government had been consulting an expert group behind closed doors and in secret, which led them to announce the compensation scheme the day after the inquiry report was published. If they had properly engaged with and trusted the experts in the community, they would have saved themselves a huge amount of work. A third set of regulations are about to be laid before Parliament that are trying to retrospectively fix the flaws in the scheme. IBCA has been landed with the job of administering this scheme, and it has no discretion. Although it is nominally independent of the Cabinet Office, our community does not believe that it truly is. Under the terms of the scheme, it has no discretion in any exceptional circumstances to do anything. If the Government had engaged early when it became obvious that significant compensation was going to have to be paid—as it did in March 2022, when Sir Robert Francis delivered his interim report on compensation—they could have used those two years to engage properly with the community, and many of the scheme’s defects would have been avoided.

To what extent have the schemes been successful in achieving positive outcomes for the individuals who have been affected?

Many of our veterans feel as though they have finally got some closure and acknowledgment, but I do not think that that is universal among the community. The figures involved are relatively small, when we talk about people who have lost their entire careers and access to pensions. It would be fair to say that some people have largely gone on to have profitable careers and have done well in their lives financially, but for others this is the opportunity to buy their first brand-new car or the first time in 30 years that they have been able to afford to go on a good holiday. There is some acceptance that this is nice to have and that it is a final acknowledgment. Probably the most profound thing—it would be interesting to hear what the other panellists have to say regarding this—would be the genuineness of an apology. The sums of money aside, the most profound and healing thing that our LGBT veterans experienced was the dedication of the memorial by His Majesty the King at the National Memorial Arboretum last year. That was the most profound and significant thing for them. It is a very mixed picture as to whether the sums are enough, because I do not believe that they are.

There are six or seven months left for veterans to claim, which is not a lot of time, and you touched on that in some of your earlier remarks. What more needs to be done by Government, or any body, to ensure that the gap between those who are caught and those who miss out is as small as possible before the end of the year?

I am talking to a table of politicians who know how to lobby, campaign and raise their profile—£60,000 does not buy you very much. To only start spending £60,000 18 months into this scheme is woefully inadequate. I would like to harness the support of every single Member of Parliament highlighting this scheme to their communities, because our veterans are spread through every corner of the country; indeed, we have veterans who live abroad. To my mind, no stone should be left unturned in seeking out the armoury of every Government Department to help uncover every single eligible LGBT veteran, and £60,000 is just not enough.

Kate, my original question was about the positive outcomes that have been achieved. Could you comment on those for your scheme?

It very much depends on individual cases. One of the inequalities that was baked into the compensation scheme when it was announced was the varying tariffs of compensation. If you were co-infected with HIV and hepatitis viruses, the amounts of compensation were over £2 million, and then, depending on your mono-infection with hepatitis viruses and the status of your condition, it could have been half a million or £800,000. People just did not understand why the expert group had come up with these numbers. On the original expert group, there was nobody who had any knowledge of bleeding disorders or haemophilia, which was an extraordinary omission. In the House, the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, offered a fulsome apology and called it a national stain on Britain, and he was right. Acknowledgment of what harm has been done is really important to these communities. Compensation, of course, is money and is valuable, and is a recognition of the lives that have been destroyed, but I cannot think of one person who wouldn’t rather have not had the money and not had the infections, or not lost their children or lost their parents.

Sir Alan, in response to a previous question you said that perhaps the state should not be involved and that that would be one way to improve these schemes. In a perfect world, how would these compensation schemes be designed without the involvement of the state, the civil servants and the bureaucracy?

It would be down to an independent organisation to create a framework and create an administration that ran all schemes across the board. But then each individual scheme—they are all very different, as you have heard today—would engage victims and their legal advisers to help design a scheme with the relevant professionals. You would need legal advice along the way, I agree, but you would only need it in one area, hopefully, at that time. If it was felt that the scheme that had been designed was fair and had engaged everybody involved, hopefully it would flow a lot more smoothly.

This question is for you, Peter, as it is unique to your scheme. How important are the non-financial restorative measures, including restoration of medals, letters of apology, service ceremonies, replacement of cap badge or beret and the Etherton ribbon? Of course people need financial compensation for the hurt and trauma that they have gone through, but how important are those other things?

For many of our veterans those things are incredibly important. The ability to march at remembrance wearing their original beret with their cap badge, and the pride with which our veterans are wearing their Etherton ribbon, which acknowledges the hurt and harm that they suffered, are incredibly appreciated. The Ministry of Defence can learn some lessons. One particular case, which has been highlighted on the Floor of the House, is that of Chris Dennis, who was dismissed from service just months before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. It has been a struggle and a fight just to get him a beret. There are many things that could be done to make it easier for those who fall outside the parameters of the strict scheme, which would go a long way towards helping to restore pride and get justice for our veterans. For every single one of our veterans who has received their Etherton ribbon—they will have chosen and opted either to have it sent to them or to attend a very moving reparations ceremony in front of a senior member of the armed service that they were in—it has been hugely restorative, so I would not underestimate those in any way, shape or form. Giving that to our veterans, who did serve and whose service is just as dignified and as important as that of anybody else who served, is vital to restore their pride and dignity. We use the phrase “putting them back on the road to the military family”, which is what we have sought to do as an organisation.

I want to follow up with all four of you on Blake’s question about how you would do it differently in future. I will deliberately leave you until last, Kate, because you are an independent delivery commission. I will start with you, Peter. The words that have come through time and again from all of you are “trust” and “independence”. I am wondering whether we should think about some sort of permanent independent commission that would have a part in designing any new schemes, because they would have learned from the previous one. Three of you, certainly, are very close to your Ministries, and I do not think that that helps trust. How would you design a scheme in future? What would the structure of the scheme look like in an ideal world?

I would like to think and hope that a scheme like this will never be required again for LGBT veterans being dismissed from the armed services.

But other things will crop up.

Yes, of course. It is important that promises should not be made that cannot be fulfilled. Our veterans were let down by a promise of a regular update, which they did not receive. The scheme was launched without the software that they wanted to use being fit and ready for purpose. The level of transparency had to be fought for. I have alluded to and talked extensively about the lack of awareness. Transparency from day one, transparent engagement, not making promises you cannot keep, only making promises that you are going to keep and fulfil, access to legal advice from day one for applicants—I think those would be the key benchmarks for any scheme, regardless of who the beneficiaries are.

Sir Alan, I’m sure you have thought about this a lot.

Yes. I think it is about true independence, and it would be key that people saw that it was true independence. I will give an example to show why something like that is so important. There were over 700 convictions overturned at one point, as you well know. They then tried to contact these people—do not hold me to these figures, because they are off the top of my head—but only 100 or so came forward. No matter how many people wrote to them—different Departments or whoever—and tried to get in touch with these other people to come forward, they would not. They had lost trust in the system, and they would not engage with these people. It has to be a totally independent body that can be seen to act independently and has the authority to do so.

Thank you; that is very helpful.

One of the main things to consider is that trauma-informed principles are aligned to the design of the scheme. The damage that has been done by the Home Office Windrush scandal to the Windrush community has been very severe and very deep. We are still seeing that it is intergenerational in its impact. The very people who have then been asked to go through that process and get redress are being retraumatised. Having trauma-informed principles from the outset is important. I want to emphasise that co-design from the start is critical for the scheme.

That is very helpful; thank you. Kate, I have deliberately left you till last, because you are a delivery authority. I was going to say “independent delivery authority”, but you are not, because it is set down in statute from Government. What ideas would you have in future as to how Government could produce an organisation that would be independent, would be trusted and would be able to design proper schemes?

I represent the Haemophilia Society, which is a charity, but the Infected Blood Compensation Authority has many of the right principles. They are independent of the Cabinet Office, although our community do not believe that. They are based in Newcastle, in their own building. They have a system of claim managers. They are still learning a lot as they go along, which is understandable because the expert advice was not there when it should have been, two or three years ago when the scheme was being designed in secret behind closed doors. Huge mistakes were made and now we are trying to retrospectively fix them through new regulations. As Reverend Clive said, co-design is absolutely critical. An independent body is absolutely critical, without having to constantly reinvent compensation schemes or have them attached to the Department that has done the most harm. I find it extraordinary that Peter is having to deal with the MOD and Reverend Clive with the Home Office. At least we have the Cabinet Office, not the Department of Health, as our sponsoring Department.

And of course Sir Alan had to deal with not only the DWP, but the Post Office.

I would like to go back to the conversation that we have already had about support for claimants. I want to get on the record what all four of you think about the extent to which those making a claim are getting sufficient support, because it sounds as if they are sourcing it from different places and sometimes dipping into their own pockets. I am keen to ask all of you how that is working at present.

It is important to separate legal support from emotional, psychological and mental health support. As a charity, we received a small sum of money from the Government to provide assistance to veterans making claims. That has put a significant burden on our very small staff—there are only 12 of us—to provide that support to veterans. We have had to rely on other agencies, including the NHS, through Op Courage, and other armed forces military charities to provide mental health support to our veterans. We have had to build up a patchwork of that support, which has been a hard piece of work in itself. The demands and needs of each individual veteran do not all come in the same shape and size, and the impacts on them are not identical. This is a really traumatic experience for people who are reliving one of the worst experiences of their lives, sometimes 30, 40 or 50 years later. As Reverend Clive said, some dedicated, trauma-informed support should be built into every system for an applicant, together with and separate from legal support. As an organisation, we went out to recruit legal firms that were willing to provide support to us—some at reduced cost and some on a pro bono basis. That has been invaluable, particularly in respect of the work on the judicial review that some of our veterans are having to undertake. We have talked to the Ministry of Defence about the issue that those individual veterans are facing. We have raised that concern and had it dismissed, ignored and dispatched, so, regrettably, we are having to go to that stage to support those veterans and to get justice for them. Mental health support—tailored, bespoke and holistic to the individual—together with access to independent legal advice, would be essential.

That is really helpful; thank you.

We are all coming from slightly different angles, but we all represent victims. As far as the Post Office victims go, certainly the GLO group were fortunate enough to have legal support that followed them through all the way, so they have something in there. There are three main firms, and there are others involved as well, and I know that the lawyers extend the range of support that they can offer to a victim where it is needed. Last week, we had a meeting with the Metropolitan police, which has an ongoing investigation into Post Office Horizon and the witnesses. I was reminded at that point that it has now been accepted that the victims are actually victims of crime, and they can use the support services that go along with that. I do not think that is something we promoted to the group, and we need to do that in future to see how they can take advantage of it.

I have to say that the support is very patchy. We see that with the nil awards, with 56 out of 100 resulting in no payment. There is heavy support from charities and volunteers. Some really strong advocate communities and organisations have been doing it from the beginning—the Windrush National Organisation, Justice 4 Windrush, Action for Race Equality. They have been the mainstay of driving this. Pro bono lawyers were supporting people because, as I mentioned earlier, the complexity and the legal support were underestimated. I welcome the £1.5 million advocacy support fund that is going out to communities and organisations, but it is not enough. The capability of those organisations is very variable. There are gaps in the level of support, particularly at the review stage. I am very concerned about the long-term sustainability of that fund as well. Advocates are playing a really important role, but they cannot do the job that lawyers can, as I said. Funded legal support is essential for fairness. That is what the victims are saying. They are finding it complex and overwhelming. I will be pushing for Ministers to look at models in which we can get the support. As I mentioned, other schemes have it, and that support is becoming much more apparent.

Once a claim begins, you are assigned a claim manager by the Infected Blood Compensation Authority who stays with you through the duration of your claim.

You have the same person throughout the process.

Yes. I believe that that is working really well. Anecdotally, we are hearing good feedback from that. We have legal support that kicks in once your claim begins, and financial advice and psychological support is available. My concern, as I said, is that the claim process appears to have stalled because IBCA are in this test and learn process. They want to get it perfect before they ramp up the estates of those who died, the living infected never compensated and the affected—the family members. We do not understand why you would not get through the claims for the cases that are relatively straightforward because there is a link to an infected person. Why wait for the most complicated cases? It is like being triaged in A&E, but it is about when you walk in, not whether you have a potentially fatal injury or a broken wrist. It does not make any sense to us.

Thank you very much. Let me stick with you, Kate. How transparent are the various schemes, whether they are compensation schemes or otherwise, about the claims process and the likely level of compensation that an individual may receive?

IBCA very helpfully produced calculators so people could go online and start to have some sense of the levels of compensation that they might get. The claims process is complicated because of medical records. The clinicians involved will say that they get very frustrated with being asked inconsistent questions—questions about tests that did not exist, for example for hepatitis C or B. The claims process itself is inconsistent because they did not have the expert knowledge within the expert group, or indeed within IBCA, to design the claims process properly. I know that clinicians in haemophilia centres will say that they are extremely frustrated by not having clear guidance on what they had to produce. Then IBCA says, “Your claim’s being held up because we cannot get the information from your clinician.” Well, the clinician cannot produce a test that did not exist in 1992. That is the expert knowledge that was missing in the design of the scheme.

May I ask you the same question, Reverend Clive, about the process and how transparent the likely level of compensation is?

Knowledge of the scheme has been fading over recent years. It has probably been the longest of the compensation schemes. I recently went on a UK tour talking to communities, and we are hearing that people are losing their knowledge of what the scheme is—“Is it still open? Can I still apply for it?” We are starting at that level of deficit. There has been some improved engagement from the Home Office with communities over recent years, but it is apparent that there is not an intensive national awareness of the fact that the scheme is still open, its status and the compensation. A limited amount of information is getting across accurately and we are still hearing misconceptions. It is clear that public knowledge of Windrush in the media is always very negative, so if communities hear that and they are hearing people saying, “I’ve applied and I’ve got a nil award,” then engagement is not going to be forthcoming. More work needs to be done to improve the transparency and accessibility of the schemes.

That is really helpful; thank you. May I ask you the same question, Sir Alan?

It is a bit different with the Post Office scheme, because each case is its own. There are not a lot of similarities between cases, which is why we have had lawyers involved. The only difference is that where thresholds have been set—where you can take an offer of up to £x thousand or whatever—then people have been able to make their own judgment on that without receiving legal aid or legal support to make their decision. It is tricky, and it is not ideal in any case, but it is a way forward. As I say, the cases are all very different in the Post Office scheme.

I will separate the discharge or dismissal payments from the impact payments. The DD is very clear: it is £50,000. Were you dismissed or discharged, that is the figure you will get. That is pretty clear. The anomaly comes for those individuals who were forced between a court martial and imprisonment, or who were forced to resign on the day, because those who took the resignation option have now been excluded from the scheme. There is a concern there, as you will be aware. Regarding the impact panel, it seems that the hardest work required from our veterans—the most painful retraumatising work—is writing the statement, and that is required for the smaller amount of money. What the Ministry of Defence got right is that the panel appointments are largely made up of known members of the LGBT community. It has provided some reassurance, strength and faith that people known to our community are sitting on those panels. The individual deliberations of the panels are not disclosed to us, but we have been able to discern that those individuals who have had legal advice—or those individuals who have put their heart and soul into their statement, opened Pandora’s box and made the most effort possible in writing their really harrowing accounts—achieve several thousand pounds more in impact payment than those who put less information in.

That is really helpful; thank you very much.

I apologise to the panel for coming to the session late. I want to pick up the issue of evidence, partly because of the experience of one of my constituents who is an LGBT veteran. It may be that this is something common to the other schemes as well. Although she seems to have provided some very compelling evidence to the Ministry of Defence—indeed, it had its own records—this was deemed insufficient, and she was made to go and find all sorts of other, obviously quite personal evidence. What are you finding about the inconsistencies in the evidence requirements? Do you feel they are maybe too onerous, particularly on those seeking compensation?

As the end of the scheme approaches, I think somebody should be appointed by the scheme to go back and start reviewing cases for consistency. There were decisions taken in the very early days, particularly by the impact panel, when they had not made any assessments whatsoever, but they now have a body of knowledge and can look back and say, “Have we been consistent here?” There is definitely an argument to say that that should be done. There is also the way the Ministry of Defence has interpreted the reverse burden of proof. For clarity, the scheme for LGBT veterans has a reverse burden of proof: the normal rule is that somebody who claims something must prove it; under our LGBT veterans scheme it is effectively not on the claimant to have to prove their case, but on the Ministry of Defence to disprove it. In my view, it has not been that consistent. There is a whole multitude of problems regarding evidence, including the destruction of historical records. The fact is that, where records have not been destroyed, there are ridiculous inconsistencies. I can point you to the example of a gay man who was dismissed using a code describing him as being “pregnant” as the reason for his dismissal. There is a lack of faith in the actual records that are found and uncovered. In respect of subject access requests, many of our veterans, based on our advice, sought to get hold of their records. Subject access requests have not been accelerated or prioritised in any way, shape or form. Many veterans are still waiting for their records to be dispatched to them, because they want to see their records before they make their application. In my view, it should be a priority for the Committee’s recommendations that the Ministry of Defence should immediately make subject access requests a priority now, with only six months to go in respect of the scheme.

If there are similar issues about the burden of evidence and proof, or inconsistencies that have not already been covered, I would be very pleased for the panel to add any further insights.

With Windrush, we are seeing a requirement for a level of documentation and information when that information is not there. Some of the historical injustice records go back decades, and people do not know where to start in trying to find them. In terms of inconsistencies in some of the decisions, I hear of people having to go through a review and qualify them, because part of the compensation scheme relates to close family member impact. One member of a family gets compensation, while another family member—the other brother, say—gets zero. They then go for a review and the decision is overturned. So we have seen some inconsistencies regarding close family members. Thirty per cent of the cases go into review, which shows that there are still challenges with the decisions. My big concern is about how we get to the right decision first time and do not overburden claimants to find paperwork that is inevitably not to hand.

It is pretty well known, with the Post Office issue, that the disclosure of documentation has been a major problem all the way through. I know that even Sir Wyn’s inquiry has had enormous problems obtaining documentation. I mentioned the Metropolitan police meeting with a victims group last week, and even there it was said that they are still struggling to get disclosure. They are up to, I think, a billion pages of evidence gathered so far, and they still have another x years to go. It does make you wonder what people are sitting on and how long they have been sitting on it. Disclosure is a big problem.

As I mentioned earlier, in many cases medical notes are missing or have been destroyed. Also, how would you know the date of infection when a test might not have existed for hepatitis C? Ireland had its infected blood inquiry over a quarter of a century ago. The chief executive of the Irish Haemophilia Society gave evidence to the infected blood inquiry and said that the date of infection is the date of your first exposure to factor 8—it was contaminated. Unfortunately, that advice was not taken on board. When we move on to the estates of those who have died, I think the problem will get dramatically worse for families having to try to provide evidence for someone who is dead.

In that case would you wish to shift a little, towards the way the veterans scheme was set up, almost to assume that there was an infection unless someone on the scheme could prove otherwise—that a person was not exposed?

Almost 100% of the haemophilia and bleeding disorder community were infected with hepatitis; almost 1,300 were co-infected with HIV; and 380 of those were children. Most of those are dead.

Terrible. May I ask you a specific question, Peter? Your scheme closes on 12 December. What are you doing to promulgate that fact, to make sure that those who are potentially eligible for the scheme make an application before that date?

In our battle for lost veterans we are seeking out those people who are missing from our community. These are people who were turfed out of the military and wanted nothing more to do with the military because of how they were treated by it. The psychological scars they have faced have meant that, in many cases, they have lived very isolated, closeted lives, so there is a real challenge in trying to find them. They are scattered all over the country, and the age profile is such that some of them are in nursing homes or care homes. We are a very small charity, with very limited resources, but we are doing everything we can to amplify that message. I can tell you that it felt like a kick in the teeth for the Ministry of Defence to tell us that we did not have sufficient experience to run their scheme and spend their £60,000 on marketing the scheme, despite us spending a year telling them to spend the money. We have not got the resources that this really needs. It is a £75 million scheme, and I think the Government should be doing everything they can, harnessing their resources in Departments like the DWP. They know every person out there who was a veteran. The Ministry of Defence knows, through the Office for Veterans’ Affairs, every single person who is eligible for a veteran card. Why are they not writing to every single veteran out there and saying, “Who did you know, who you served with, who was kicked out for being a member of the LGBTQ community between 1967 and 2000?”, and then telling them about the scheme. It makes perfect common sense, and it is incredibly frustrating. It feels especially frustrating for me, as somebody who served in the Government when the apology came out and who was working alongside the then Veterans Minister when it came out, to see the lack of drive and impetus to make sure that every single person is found. The Government have massive resources to be able to do that.

I have a quick question on the structure. You have commented, Sir Alan, about having an independent body. If we look at different countries around the world, Australia has a stand-alone national redress agency, the United States has “special masters” projects, and Canada uses third-party administrators. I was wondering whether I could tease out some of your thoughts, if I may, on some of those examples around the world, or where your thoughts would lead to about what type of body we should be looking at in this country. Do you have any developed thoughts on that?

The governance is key to the whole thing. We would need a board, like us here, of people who are recognised nationally for the type of work they have done, and who are prepared to fight and prove their independence, if need be. You say there are other schemes; I will be quite honest that I have not looked into such schemes. All I can see is the problems with the schemes in this country, and what you need to remove from the schemes to try to get them going. You certainly have to start by taking lessons or hearing from a whole host of other people who have been involved, including the lawyers and the victims. There is a need for a forum to start to develop something. Once you start forming some sort of organisation, it is down to them to come forward with their scheme and how they want to take it forward. They can take lessons from the better schemes around the world.

One of the successes has been balancing speed with accuracy. Some of the schemes have introduced fixed-sum tariff offers; would you say that has been a successful approach in the programmes it has been offered in? Should we look at that in future for all schemes?

It has worked for a lot of people who just wanted to move on, who have got on with their lives in the interim and have not suffered very serious damage. The big concern now is that certain people have taken these amounts and then realised later that they should never have done so. A lot of the victims are in a very bad way financially, and picking up £75,000 easily in a few weeks, if they agree to it, makes a huge difference, but they are perhaps not receiving the true value of their claim. There has to be some sort of way they can go back and review if, at some later stage, other evidence comes to light that had affected them and been covered up over that period, or the parameters change regarding some of these schemes.

There are some significant lessons to be learned about LGBT veterans from Canada. The Canadian Purge Fund was put on a statutory footing, with a significant endowment from the Government to deal with the long-term consequences for the LGBT community. That is clearly missing from our scheme here in the UK.

Fixed tariffs need to be explained properly. One of the problems with our community is that there is no clear definition of why, for being co-infected with HIV and hepatitis as opposed to co-infected with different hepatitis viruses and having cirrhosis of the liver, the difference in compensation was as much as £800,000. Nobody has been able to explain it. For those with bleeding disorders who were unethically tested on, some as children, originally the compensation awards were going to be £10,000 and £15,000. Nobody could explain why. In the latest set of regulations, they have improved that to £35,000 or £45,000 but, again, there has been no explanation. How have you arrived at a number for a child who has been multiply exposed to a virus and unethically tested on, and said, “It’s £35,000”? Where is the explanation for how that number was arrived at? Fixed tariffs could work, but they need to be defined.

My last question—Kate, you raised this—is about what seems to be a coherent theme of a lack of trust between the individual and the body. That is sometimes because, in Peter’s example, it is associated with the Ministry of Defence, and sometimes because there is a lack of trust in the Government to deliver. For whichever body that hopefully might be created as a recommendation from the NAO, how would you go about resetting that trust? Do you think people should be involved before an organisation is set up, as statutory consultees and part of the process? Do you think there should be a requirement to recruit from certain organisations? How would you fix the disconnect that we currently see? That is a common theme throughout some of these compensation schemes.

It would need to be co-designed with representatives of the different communities who have been through all this terrible trauma, because they are the experts on what worked well, what did not go well and how we can truly learn from the Post Office, LGBT veterans, Windrush, infected blood, Grenfell and Hillsborough scandals—the list goes on and on. The lack of trust among us as a community is reflected straight back from the lack of trust in anybody in a position of authority. Truth and justice was denied for decades, so anybody in authority is immediately looked at with suspicion.

All of us here come from different angles and each of our campaigns have their own particular strand of things. I was talking about an independent body, an oversight body, but each scheme that it ran would be very different from the next scheme. It would be put together and managed overall by one organisation, so we are not reinventing the wheel time and again. Everyone then brings in their own experts and their own victims to have a say on how their particular scheme should be run.

Thank you for making that clear. That is what I understood you meant, but I appreciate that.

I have one more question—I will start with you, Sir Alan—on whether it is possible to design compensation schemes that are non-litigious. It seems to me that you would never have got anywhere if it had not been for the court case, so I don’t know whether it is possible. Clearly, if you could design them as non-litigious, they could be quicker and cheaper and victims would get compensation quicker.

The schemes came after the court cases, but we would never have got the schemes if we had not achieved the two judgments that we did. The TV drama was fantastic, but it was those judgments that made the big difference in all of this.

I thought you would say that, but I wanted that on the record. Does anybody else have a view on non-litigious conciliation-type schemes? A court case, particularly if it has to go through the full court case and then go to appeal, takes a long time for the victim to get their money.

LGBT veterans in this country had to go to the European Court of Human Rights in 1999 for the ban on their service to be declared illegal. Nothing then happened for our LGBT veterans until the Defence Select Committee review in 2022. Thanks to the wonderful work of Lord Etherton coming up with his recommendations and scheme, we have been lucky in that we have not had to have litigation for many, many years. But now, because of the inadequacies of the scheme, some of our veterans are having to go to litigation.

Reverend Clive and Kate, do either of you have views on this?

Sir Alan mentioned it earlier. What people want is fairness and justice that is swift. Justice delayed is justice denied. With Windrush, people just want their dignity and their sense of belonging and respect identified. We recognise that sometimes that might require a court procedural process, but at the heart of it is a sense that justice and fairness is delivered.

Do you have anything to add, Kate?

Just to say I believe that members of the bleeding disorder community will start to take legal action where they feel that the compensation they are being offered is not proportionate to the harm that was done to them.

In closing, I thank all four of you very much. You have given us some pretty harrowing evidence. Your evidence is very important to this inquiry and we will consider it. An uncorrected transcript will be available in the next few days. We will consider your evidence very carefully indeed and hopefully come up with recommendations that will help people not necessarily in your schemes, but people in future. Thank you very much indeed. You are all busy people. I wish all of your members who are claiming compensation swift justice, and I hope that they do manage to succeed where their case is warranted. I am extremely grateful to you all for coming today.