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Health and Sport Committee 09 February 2016

09 Feb 2016 · S4 · Health and Sport Committee

Item of business

Penrose Inquiry

Philip Dolan (Scottish Infected Blood Forum) Watch on SPTV

I agree with many of the things that Bill Wright has said. I have written a history of the subject, and I feel like I have been haunting this place and the corridors with the black and white tiles since 1999. What troubles and concerns me and members of the Scottish Infected Blood Forum, which—as I said in my submission—represents people who have been infected with hepatitis C, is that many people who wanted to be witnesses and to tell their stories were not heard. I have this morning distributed, for members to read later, the stories that some of the people who have been affected would have liked to have given to the inquiry. I am concerned about the way in which the Penrose inquiry treated that aspect. The inquiry made no mention of missing medical records and people’s batch numbers. There is nothing in the report about the fact that David Owen—Lord Owen—and Patrick Jenkin, both former health ministers at Westminster, found suddenly that documents that they had were, unfortunately, shredded by junior members of staff when they got to the Department of Health. As I said in my submission, we expressed concern that the Penrose inquiry called only six victims as witnesses. Plenty of doctors, scientists and people from the Department of Health were called as witnesses, but where were the victims? I put on the record the fact that many people wanted to be core participants but that, at the end of the day, Lord Penrose allowed only six of those people to give evidence. The appeal was heard by Lord Penrose himself. It goes against natural justice for a judge to hear an appeal against his own decision. Of even more concern was the fact that when the counsel who was talking about hepatitis C on my behalf said, “Mr Dolan has the sword of Damocles hanging over his head,” Lord Penrose’s response was, “You mean a feather duster.” That is how dismissive he was: my having contracted hepatitis C was seen as nothing. We could say nothing: along with many other people, I sat in the background and was not allowed to say anything. As I have said elsewhere, on the very first day Lord Penrose said in his initial statement that the inquiry was being funded by the national health service, and that therefore every pound spent on it was a pound that would be taken away from patient care, and that every time a doctor appeared at it, that was time away from the health service. He had nothing to say about the fact that, in the audience that day were a number of widows, widowers and families whose relatives had died. They did not seem to exist as far as the inquiry was concerned. Two of the victims who were heard at the inquiry were heard because the legal people had taken a case under the Human Rights Act 1998, which meant that the Court of Session insisted that both were heard. Only four other victims were heard as witnesses. On the first day I said that the inquiry was a whitewash, and on the last day I said that it was a whitewash. I have spent years and years, going back to the 1980s, campaigning to get justice. I do not mean just financial justice; justice is about getting an answer to why this happened, but the Penrose report does not provide that answer.

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Health and Sport Committee 09 February 2016

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