Selected Transcripts of the Archer Independent Inquiry
Wednesday, 11th July 2007
Evidence of the Rt Hon Lord Owen
THE RT. HON LORD OWEN (called)
THE CHAIRMAN: We are very grateful to Lord Owen for agreeing to come here today and give evidence. Lord Owen, would you like to begin by summarising your evidence and then perhaps we can ask some specific questions afterwards?
LORD OWEN: Well, as you say, Lord Archer, I have submitted some written evidence; two pages, a summary and a suggested chronology, because I notice the chronologies that have been published by the department have very significantly omitted a large part of the information that has been given to Parliament. One of my main concerns is that Parliament was told that we aimed to have a target date of self-sufficiency in blood products in two to three years -- that was in 1975, so it was 1977 and 1978, and I hope the Inquiry will find out when Parliament was properly told about why there was a delay, was this a decision taken by ministers, or was it a decision taken by civil servants, and in my view, if it was, why was the Ombudsman so unwilling to investigate on a maladministration case which I presented to him way back in the 1980s. The other issue which I hope you will also be able to elicit is why my own private papers were pulped. I mean I would be staggered to wake up suddenly and find that my private papers as foreign secretary had been pulped without my consent, but I admit there is a difference in that I was only Minister of State, but the issues we were dealing with were extremely important, and to suddenly find that, under an alleged ten year rule, ministerial papers can be pulped, and we are not allowed to disclose these documents for 30 years, seems to me to be rather bizarre.
But much more important was the pulping and destruction of departmental papers from February 1989 to 1982. Now I kept on mentioning to journalists and others they should look at France. I must say I have not done this before, but I think it is very important to just state facts, and whether they will lead us a to explanation of the pulping and destruction of the departmental papers I do not know. But by 1989 it was very well known that there was a major scandal underway in France, very similar to the circumstances here. Indeed it was so made very public when a group calling themselves Honour of France blew up a car of Dr Michael Baretta(?) of Paris-based CNT. He was then, with others, found guilty -- three out of four defendants found guilty, including Dr Baretta, who received a four-year prison sentence in a trial in June 1992. So in the very period from May 1989 between February 1992, when it is now admitted at long last by the Department that there has been a destruction of documents in the Department of Health, and almost a total filleting out of all the papers relating to the inventory, that did coincide with it being a world scandal and well-known in this country, but there are those who -- and I think this is a very important – I am not capable of making that judgment. Then I must say it is an extraordinary situation that there is just this one little piece of paper which relates to my period in office which came up in the documents, although I will say it is an extremely interesting piece of paper and it is mentioned in the Guardian today, but what it reveals is it reinforces my memory of the whole events, that there was resistance in the department to going for self-sufficiency. I cannot remember exactly why, I suspect it was the deep financial pressures we were coming under for the Health Service budget. Also a tradition of thinking that the Regional Blood Transfusion Service was to a great extent autonomous, and they did not want the department officials did not want to tell them how to spend their allocation of money and how to choose their priorities. Nevertheless this document does make it absolutely clear that, "The department" -- and I quote, this is 20th February 1976:
"The department has sought to have this project given special priority, and it seems to me [this is the unknown person who wrote this] that we must now devise some means of ensuring that Oxford are able to let the contracts and get on with the necessary works."
And Oxford is a reference to the very big facility in the Regional Blood Transfusion Service at Oxford. In the first paragraph it also summarises really quite succinctly what they knew:
"Quite apart from this the alternative of buying the commercial product (with its higher Hepatitis risk) is more costly than producing our own."
And it ends by saying:
"I should be grateful if you could consider as a matter of urgency what can be done. The Minister of State [which was me] has called for another progress report on AHG production, which we must let him have in the very near future."
So this sole document really covers most of the ground about what we knew at the time, and previously I have not been able to enforce this, because I am just relying on my memory. Anyway those are the main points I wish to make, and I think it is more important to use the time to answer any questions that you may have.
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you, we are most grateful for that. Just taking up the point about the Ombudsman, as I understand it, the principal reason the Ombudsman gave was the rather significant one that it was not maladministration, it was the consequence of a political decision. Is that what you understood it to say?
LORD OWEN: It was a very extraordinary letter, the one that was sent to me by the then Ombudsman Mr. Barraclough. He actually questioned the basis for my decision. He argued that because I had not said in my answers to the House of Commons that I was afraid that the blood was contaminated, I was making this decision purely and simply on cost grounds. I then entered into a conversation with him saying, "Well, how could I, knowing that haemophiliacs were" -- there was no alternative, we had decided to import blood products a year before I became minister, we had no alternative. Now, I mean it is always a very different question for ministers to reveal a risk or to get on as far as possible to reduce the risk. I took a choice to reduce the risk, and it seemed to me the right choice at that time. He then went on to make -- discussions about the question of the medical aspect, which I felt could only have come from him having access to medical information. So when I asked the Ombudsman most recently, this year, to look back through their records, which again you will see from the letter from the Ombudsman they don't keep any papers, they don't have any records, they don't even keep hard files, computer files. And I find the whole structure quite extraordinary. It appears -- I am not yet understanding -- does the Ombudsman go back to the ministry of health for their medical information but at that time of course I was not able to say to the Ombudsman look here there is a memo here which makes it quite clear we knew there was contamination but it has become very obvious that the medical profession were well aware of the risks of contamination in 1973 and on progressively as the years went by. I did complain to the Select Committee on the Ombudsman. I do not know whether you will consider this in your terms of reference, but instinctively I am against people suing the Department of Health. I am sure you find this yourself, I have often discouraged constituents and it has to be said that the many of the Haemophiliac Society and others only went to the court of law when there was no alternative; they were right up against the deadline when they had to have a group decision. I have always personally been attached to a no fault compensation scheme, and that underlies my feeling. I always understood the creation of the Ombudsman was to try and get satisfaction without having to go to court. I had to -- they would only look at an individual case. Fortunately, I was able to have in my constituency a person who at that stage was a haemophiliac and had tragically developed AIDS. He gave me permission to use his case. I found every possibly obstacle put up by the Ombudsman, and successive Ombudsmen, and incredible delays. All I can say is, if that is the structure that Parliament is relying on to try to avoid people having to go to court -- and most people don't want to take doctors to court, they know mistakes can be made, they just want to know the facts -- I think we need to look at the whole question of Ombudsmen.
THE CHAIRMAN: Well, some of us, of course, argued very vigorously as long ago as the 1960s and 1970s for a system of no fault liability for all kinds of reasons.
LORD OWEN: I think you and I were at ministerial meetings that argued the same and we were on the same side.
THE CHAIRMAN: Indeed. But when I said that the Ombudsman gave us a reason that it was a political decision, I did not think -- I may be wrong -- that he was referring to your ministerial decision; I thought he was saying, "You are complaining about events which happened after you left office. The reason why your intentions were not fulfilled was because of political decisions and not maladministration". Whether that was right or not, that was what I understood him to be saying.
LORD OWEN: Yes. I think that was, but he had not produced any evidence for that.
THE CHAIRMAN: Well, no.
LORD OWEN: I come back to the other question which is, it was a very narrow definition of maladministration. I mean, as we all know, ministers make decisions and they let Parliament know. In this case it was an important decision. We were allocating in those days only half a million pounds, but half a million pounds was quite a lot in those days, with the pressures and constraints. I did it in written answers, so it was a conscious decision; I wanted Parliament to know.
The understanding is that if ministers, or if the Department is unable to meet a public commitment that is made to Parliament, there is an obligation on the officials to notify ministers and then for ministers to come to Parliament and say that we have not been able meet that date, explain why -- and in many of the cases there is a perfectly rational explanation -- but the fact that they did not know and that people were believing that there was going to be self-sufficiency is a very material fact, because the haemophiliacs were well aware of the worry that was around blood supplies and they were given to understand that we would be self-sufficient by 1977 or 1978. Now, I do not always think that you can expect ministers -- some minister comes in and inherits my decisions, governments changed during this period, and I think the onus is on the civil service to come to ministers and say, parliament needs to be told that we have not fulfilled the obligation that has been said to them.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes. I wonder whether we could just now fill in the parameters in terms of dates just so we know where we are. I think you were appointed to the Department in March 1974?
LORD OWEN: Yes.
THE CHAIRMAN: Initially as Parliamentary Secretary?
LORD OWEN: Yes.
THE CHAIRMAN: And then a little later that summer as Minister of State?
LORD OWEN: Yes.
THE CHAIRMAN: And I think you moved to the Foreign Commonwealth Office in September 1976?
LORD OWEN: Yes.
THE CHAIRMAN: Could I ask you this. What first drew your attention to the problem of infected blood products?
LORD OWEN: I read a very remarkable book by Richard Titmuss called The Gift Relationship. I cannot remember exactly, but I know I read it before I became minister, so it was probably 1972. I think it is a very remarkable book, and very rarely do sociological studies have such concrete evidence underpinning their theories, and for those who don't understand it, it is worth remembering. It was a belief that a blood transfusion service that was based on what he called loosely "the gift relationship", where people were not paid, where they came in as volunteers, who were given a cup of tea and that was all, were much more likely --
THE CHAIRMAN: I can remember this, because I gave blood at that period.
LORD OWEN: Well, they were much more likely to answer correctly where they had a probing question such as, "Have you ever been yellow, or have you ever had jaundice?", than somebody who comes in and is receiving payment for their blood. Now I remember this vividly, because when I read the book I remembered when I was a medical student in Greece and was short of money I had given blood and been paid for it. So it was a vivid thing. I knew the cash relationship would change the likelihood of you being completely straightforward about this. Then we knew from what Titmuss was describing and what was already well-established -- he was working on well-known facts -- that a lot of the blood donors were coming from communities that were into drugs and therefore were always potentially at risk to infections. Of course in those days we had just come to know about Hepatitis C, but we still did not know about HIV.
THE CHAIRMAN: And if I remember, at that period the serious nature of Hepatitis C had not become clear, had it?
LORD OWEN: The possibility of getting cancer as a result of having had jaundice from Hepatitis C was not very well-known, no.
THE CHAIRMAN: Could I just ask you this --
LORD OWEN: Cancer of the liver.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes. Within the Department was this something which was well-known that there were problems with blood purchased abroad? Was it a general topic of conversation, or was it something which only reached the surface very occasionally when it appeared on a minister's desk?
LORD OWEN: I cannot remember whether we discussed it collectively with ministers. We used to meet once a week. Barbara Castle was Secretary of State for Health and Social Services, and she had then two ministers of state: Mr. Brian O'Malley was the social security and I was Health. Then we had the Minister for Disablement, Alf Morris, and Sir Jack Ashley was Parliamentary Private Secretary for Barbara Castle and we would discuss every week what was happening. It may well have been raised in those sorts of issues, I cannot remember. But I mean, as for making public statements, making speeches about them, which are enclosed in my evidence, again the Department in their chronology really downgrade the fact of how frequently Parliament was informed about this. There was a World in Action programme on this in 1975, a transcript of which I have given, and they then went on to do two other programmes and, as I say, there was a press release, which they say was put out by the Department, but it was a speech which I had made in a big international conference.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes.
LORD OWEN: It was well-known and the haemophiliac world, who was watching these things very closely, were well aware of what was happening and many of them knew, really, the background to why we were doing this. It was not just on cost grounds.
THE CHAIRMAN: You said a few moments ago that there was a certain reluctance in the Department to do much about self-sufficiency. If you do not remember this please say so, but we have rather formed the impression that there was a debate going on -- quite a well-informed debate -- and the argument for self-sufficiency was first that imported products were suspect and, secondly, as you say, some people seemed to have been impressed by the additional expense of imported products over home produced products. But on the other hand, there were those who were saying if we ceased to import products this would reduce clinical choice and, secondly, that it is dangerous to tie yourself to one source of supply, because if anything interrupts that you would not have any source of supply at all. Do you remember this debate?
LORD OWEN: I think I do remember it. It was very -- you know, we are talking a long time ago.
THE CHAIRMAN: Indeed.
LORD OWEN: But I do remember this debate and I think my answer to that would be -- well, firstly, I was not in the position to instantly announce self-sufficiency. We had to get the capital programme, we had to increase the number of blood transfusions, we had to make a whole lot of decisions inside the Blood Transfusion Service, so I knew it would take time. Furthermore, I knew that there was great dangers in just allowing this money to go into the regional health allocation and that is why there is talk about there being special arrangements, and we made at this time also special arrangements for that class of patients who needed to go into treatment for their violent behaviour, but whom we did not want to put in prison and we did not want to put in Broadmoor and other hospitals. So there had been a report by a previous home secretary, Rab Butler, about this, and he earmarked money for the regional health authorities and told them to spend it on this; it was earmarked money. Three or four years later, through various investigations, Parliament discovered the regional health authorities had taken this earmarked money and not used it. Now, that is a classic case of why it was difficult: this idea of autonomy of decision-making was quite strong. I think that was beginning to come up in this Oxford reluctance, but that is why I had a series of minutes, or deadlines, in which they had to report to me. I was worried that they were not going to fulfill it. Anyhow, these sorts of debates are very attractive aspects of the openness in the Department of Health. I mean the Department of Health is a pleasure to be in. By and large the civil servants are very committed to the Health Service and want to make it work, they are living with constrained resources and they are having to make all the time decisions as to where you were going to spend money -- if you like, rationing. But my experience is, once the minister made up his mind -- in this case I decided we were to go for self-sufficiency -- then they carried it out. So I do not believe it would be in the Department, the lack of -- it was probably in the regional transfusion service where there was a sluggishness and slowness and that should have been monitored very carefully, and from all the evidence in this memo it was being monitored. So I think the Department officials were well aware by 1977 and 1978 that we were at a low target now. It is also very true that more and more people were using blood products, more and more haemophiliacs were using blood products. On a question of whether there should be a choice, I think there should be a choice of treatments, but I do not think there should be a choice of treatments when there is a very high risk of further contamination. So I think it would have been perfectly legitimate, once you had got self-sufficient levels and were reasonably confident you could meet all the demands, to withdraw products from abroad. That was certainly not a decision I was capable, or would have wanted to take in 1974, 1975 or 1976.
THE CHAIRMAN: And of course when you say "choice", presumably it would normally be the choice of the patient after a patient had had the situation explained and what were the arguments?
LORD OWEN: Yes. I mean haemophilia is dealt with by a fairly small group of doctors who specialise in it and become very expert in it. The general practitioner helps, of course, in that sort of thing, but the number of doctors who are specialists in the country on haemophilia – I do not know how many there are, but they are not a very large number. They are a closed community. They know about all this debate and they are linked in to the Blood Transfusion Service and they know about what is happening. These are dedicated people, they see these patients in regular time and they often see them getting worse, so they are extremely keen to control the bleeding and the side effects, therefore, of the bleeding. I think they want the best for their patients. There was never any question of we were not going to provide this because it was not cost effective. We were a long way -- I used the word "rationing" in 1975 about healthcare and that was considered a very bold and rather dangerous thing to talk about, but of course it had been going on for year years and it is much more overt now and we have a formal structure.
THE CHAIRMAN: Exactly. Now, I wonder whether you can help us with, perhaps, the ethos of that period. We have had a lot of evidence from people who themselves or their families were given infected blood and one of their complaints is: we can see what the dilemma was, but it was never explained to us and we were not given the choice. Now, would it be fair to say that at that period doctors tended to be less informative to their patients than they are now?
LORD OWEN: Yes, I think there is no doubt. There has been a sea-change in what we consider the rights of the patient and I think now this would be considered almost by every doctor that the right of the patient would be to explain to them the risk of these things and they would be done. There are some people who regret the change, and I suppose -- but I am no longer a doctor in a proper clinical sense, I am not -- even my family do not think I am safe to treat them now, and soon the GMC will stop me treating myself, which I object to very strongly. But I think that is a change which has taken place -- freedom of information, the whole culture has changed -- and I think most people would say, and my friends who are doctors tell me, that on balance this has been an improvement. But there are sometimes downsides. You have to confront people with risks which they are not always capable of understanding and cause a lot of fear – and some would argue, from the old system, unnecessary fear. But I think that we were a hierarchical profession and probably still are. Anyhow, these are discussions that are being debated very fully in Parliament and Parliament has made its choice in most cases and personally I think it is correct. So if I was now a doctor and I could move myself back to 1976, I think I would have a much bigger debate amongst myself as to whether this should have been told to haemophiliac patients.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes, thank you. Could we look now at the reasons why your intentions were not fulfilled as we have them partly from the Department. First of all, I think as you said, there was a greater demand for these products than the expert committee had originally envisaged, was there not?
LORD OWEN: There is no doubt that that is the case. I think there is a rather informative letter which I wrote to an MP about this whole question and I revealed then really almost all the facts. I think it is in 1975, a letter came to my attention from my own personal papers and I think that gives about as good a description of what we were feeling at the time.
THE CHAIRMAN: I think we have it. I think we will probably have to index the documents we have now much more closely than we have in the past.
LORD OWEN: I think I make mention of it in the ... It is correspondence between myself and the then Labour MP Andrew Bennett MP, on 4th December 1975 and 23rd February 1976. It is attachment two in my submission to you.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes.
LORD OWEN: I thought that was a rather detailed description.
THE CHAIRMAN: Indeed, yes. So you accept what we have generally been told: that there was this escalation?
LORD OWEN: Oh yes, I have no doubt whatever and I think that my successors would have been faced with the question of having to find more resources and to increase the number of blood transfusions.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes.
LORD OWEN: If we were going to keep pace on the target date which I was setting. I would have thought that was maybe even becoming apparent in 1976, but it is pretty clear I must have held a meeting soon after that note of 25th February and then I made another statement to Parliament and I would not have made that unless -- I mean on 28th April 1976 in a written answer, at column 106:
"Provided that sufficient donors remain willing to give blood, the National Blood Transfusion Service can generally satisfy the demands made on it."
There was always this worry that we were not going to get quite enough donations and that was one of the problems.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes. Well, the other reason which seems to have been given is that although provision was made to increase the volume of donations, no provision was made for processing the products once they had been collected. Can you help us at all on that?
LORD OWEN: Well, that was one of the things that was done by the Oxford facility, from what I remember, and they had to increase their production. I cannot remember the exact details. Then much later on in early 1980s came the question of building a new facility and there was a delay over the building of the facility and I am not quite sure what underpinned that. I want to be quite clear. I do not believe that there was a conspiracy. I mean people were not deliberately trying not to meet these targets. What I think was wrong was the Department was not told more about this dilemma during this period, but I have not really done any research through the Parliamentary answers in the period in which I was no longer in the Department, so from 1976 right through to 1981/1982 I do not know the extent of the questioning. The questioning comes very strongly again in 1987 and 1988, but I do not know what the questioning -- how much was revealed to Parliament at that time.
THE CHAIRMAN: I think your evidence is the first occasion certainly that I had grasped that it was not only at the Blood Products Laboratory Elstree which was processing these products, but there was also one at Oxford?
LORD OWEN: Well I think so. I cannot remember it exactly. You see it says here:
"If we are to continue to insist that any extra capital required must be met out of next year's normal allocation, it is understandable that Oxford would wish to assess the priority of AHG production against all the other commitments which the Regional Health Authority have to find money and the authority's order of priorities may not be the same as those in the Department."
Then it goes on to say:
"The Department have sought to have this project given special priority and it seems to me that we must now device some means of ensuring that Oxford are able to let the contract and get on with the necessary works."
So we are talking more than just blood transfusions. We are talking about works which needed a capital sum, and I think at that stage most of it was going to Oxford. We were also getting some blood from Scotland, where there has traditionally been more production than they needed and there was cross-border allocations.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes, we saw that. We were also told that in I think July 1979, which of course was after you left the Department, there was an inspection of the facilities at Elstree, which produced a rather disturbing report about hygiene and so forth?
LORD OWEN: I think that is true. I only became aware of that in the late 1980s, but I think there was no doubt that there was some problem at Elstree and it had not had enough capital allocation. There was a very interesting article on the Blood Transfusion Service and the National Health Service in the British Medical Journal on 12th September 1987, which I have included in my evidence to you.
THE CHAIRMAN: Yes.
LORD OWEN: Then there was some lively correspondence in the BMJ from those defending the Blood Transfusion Service and those who were critical of it. So I think that gives you a pretty good cover of the different opinions about the management of the Blood Transfusion Service in the 1970s and early 1980s.
THE CHAIRMAN: This may be difficult, because it was a long time ago, but can you recollect when you were in office whether your attention was ever called to problems at Elstree?
LORD OWEN: No, I can't. To be honest, I just do not know. I am fairly sure there was a -- in the controversy over finding out how much money we needed to find and how to get self-sufficiency, there must have been some assessment made about Elstree, but I cannot remember it. The normal thing would be to go back to your papers and find all the minutes of the meetings and know who was there and who was responsible. I do not quite understand, for example, why all the names of the key people on this document are blocked out.
THE CHAIRMAN: I quite agree. One of the problems that we have had is to discover who was writing to whom, but that is obviously something we will have to address in the future. I think those are the matters which are uppermost in my mind. Judith?
MS WILLETS: I just wondered to what extent you were aware of, or where the knowledge would have been in terms of when purchasing products from abroad what the protocols and processes would have been in terms of granting licences for those products to the purchased. I wondered what the background was?
LORD OWEN: I very much doubt that I went into that detail. I think perhaps when the first decision was taken in 1973 to go and buy blood products abroad, whoever made that decision might well have gone into the background of it, but I do not remember doing so. I mean, I want you to get clear, I do not think there was any argument among the doctors about the risk of contamination. I mean, this thing makes it clear. They are sensible people, these people. By and large, the doctors in the Ministry of Health are people who specialise in public health and they are people, therefore, who are very much more aware of this type of problem; they are not so much clinicians, they are people who, by and large, are experts in public health. The problem was treasury issues. Were we entitled to tell the regional health authority that we would make it self-sufficiency? Well, I decided we were. Were we able to make some special earmarking of money? Well, in this case it appears there was an open debate between Oxford and the Department and they knew that we wanted it, so I do not know.
MS WILLETS: The original half million; there were subsequent quarter of a millions scheduled to come in in the subsequent years, is that right?
LORD OWEN: Well, there would certainly have had to be, once you started having much increased demand, so you would have needed more facilities. So it is perfectly reasonable for the next government to have done something about Elstree and started to build another plant there, perhaps. That would have been a necessity and that was a much bigger expenditure. At that time presumably once again the question of self-sufficiency and the arguments were entered into and presumably were sustained. But, I mean, I do not quite understand why we are not told which civil servants made this decision to scrap all these documents. I mean, we have a history of the National Health Service, the historian -- the point about the government -- has just gone through and written a wonderful history of the National Health Service. Who decides what documents he should see? How can you write a history of the National Health Service when people can destroy the whole segment of documents? This was not just a few documents, this was selectively going at the subject. Well, I am very against conspiracy theories, because they are usually torn out to be failures. The foul-up theory is much more frequent. But the more you look at this, the more you look at the question of what was happening in France, the more you begin to see people who were fearful of having the same legal processes going on in London and in this country, I think at the very least the government, having at long last announced -- after all, they are not responsible, this is years ago. But they did eventually, under pressure from Lord Morris and others in the House of Lords, they did have this investigation and they now tell us this took place, they tell us it was an official who did this on his own, and I think we should know who this official is and we should actually hear from him and, if he is still alive, ask him to give evidence.
THE CHAIRMAN: I think we will be asking some questions about that.
LORD OWEN: I am very pleased to hear it, thank you.
THE CHAIRMAN: One other matter that I did intend to ask you about. A product cannot be imported and used in this country, can it, until it is licensed under the Medicines Act?
LORD OWEN: Right.
THE CHAIRMAN: Now, as I read the Medicines Act -- and this is a lawyer not a doctor talking -- the Secretary of State is responsible to be the licensing authority. Fairly clearly he can't do that himself --
LORD OWEN: Or she.
THE CHAIRMAN: Or she. They are advised by a committee. I wonder whether you could tell us any more about that process and was it something that was frequently brought to your attention?
LORD OWEN: The Medicines Act under which that operated on was a very interesting example, a very early one, of government and industry co-operating very fully and in my view it was a very successful legislation. It allowed us to attract many pharmaceutical companies to invest in research in this country and they had confidence that there was a transparent and open system of assessment in which they participated as the industry. So it was jointly done between civil servants, government scientists and people from the industry. There was a great deal of confidence in the Medicines Act at that stage. I was actually the sponsoring minister for the pharmaceutical industry in those days -- it was later taken away -- and it was a very good relationship, in fact so good that I argued inside the government, and got permission for one moment, to use the Medicines Act to deal with smoking, but it was eventually dropped. But I would defend the Medicines Act and its procedures. It is certainly one I had a lot of confidence in, but it was definitely joint, in which industry felt they had a full say.
THE CHAIRMAN: I see. But the final say was with the committee presumably?
LORD OWEN: Yes, the Secretary of State would be advised by the committee. The politicians would not get involved in that. I mean, by and large, we have to take advice and in an area like medicine you are really heavily dependant on the scientific and medical advice which you get. Occasionally I would challenge it on the basis of inadequate medical knowledge, but ...
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Vijay?
MR MEHAN: Lord Owen, just to reinforce Lord Archer, to say thank you for your time in coming today and all the evidence you have provided to us. It has been extremely helpful. I am just asking your opinion on how you believe there might be closure for the haemophiliac community over this issue, including those who are widows and their dependants. Would that be an issue of recognition from government, restoring trust, an issue of preventing this issue occurring in the future? What are your thoughts on that?
LORD OWEN: Well, I think we have already touched on it. Some of these issues relate to what was the climate of the time in terms of public opinion, in terms of transparency, in terms of openness and freedom of information and things like that. I believe this committee is doing great work, but I am sure you are the first to admit it would be much better if this was one with the full authority of government behind it.
THE CHAIRMAN: We are very conscious of that.
LORD OWEN: And I hear that there is going to be a serious inquiry in Scotland with the resources of the Scottish Health Authority, which I very much welcome. I think you will find that there was less of a problem in Scotland. But I am not sure you can ever get closure. The constituents who I was involved with are now dead. The compensation scheme, well it was a fight to get it in and it has worked, but of course a lot of people do not feel it is generous enough. Then there is always the argument of, should it be retrospective? These are difficult questions and I think you have to recognize that money is difficult to get -- I do not know. I am not sure I know how to get closure on it. I do not think you ever do get closure on these things. But a feeling that people have tried, the experience in truth commissions and things like that in different parts of the world, seems to me to indicate that the mere attempt to try, even in these circumstances, this inquiry will do good.
MR MEHAN: Thank you for that.
LORD OWEN: I will return my documents to my own library at Liverpool University. You have had them and the inquiry have had all of them.
THE CHAIRMAN: I think we have copies of all of them, thank you.
LORD OWEN: And I will put my own evidence into the library, so it will be at Liverpool University and people are welcome to use it.
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. Is there anything else you think we have not asked you about?
LORD OWEN: No. I hope you get to the bottom of it.
LORD ARCHER: Thank you. We are most grateful, thank you very much.