‘Their lives were ruined, but no one would listen’
As the blood transfusion scandal rages, one victim and his solicitor tell a tale of human tragedy and neglect, writes Cara Mcgoogan
Without Des Collins, the scale of Britain’s contaminated blood scandal might never have been realised. The 4,800 or so people infected with HIV and hepatitis C in the Seventies and Eighties, by blood products designed to help them, could still be fighting to have their stories heard. The families of the almost 3,000 who have died may have given up hope of ever finding justice.
But Collins was ready to listen when two victims approached him for help in 2017 – and he was prepared to fight.
“Victims were penalised, criticised and ostracised because they had Aids,” says the 70-year-old founder and senior partner at Collins Solicitors. “These people fought and fought, but no one listened … their lives were ruined, but they were deprived of compensation because it was covered up.”
This week, as the longawaited public inquiry began, 12 victims took the stand and,
for the first time, shared their harrowing stories of sickness, stigma and grief; of lives destroyed by the “biggest scandal in NHS history”. Theresa May has announced an annual increase in payments to victims to £75 million.
It has taken four decades to reach this point, and multiple failed attempts at justice. Those infected have watched friends around them die without ever getting answers. Children have been orphaned and young women widowed. Families have been torn apart by forced terminations, suicides and relentless hospital appointments.
The story of the blood scandal began in 1973, when the NHS started importing blood and blood products from the US for patients with haemophilia, a genetic disorder that prevents blood from clotting effectively. The health service had been struggling to meet demand for Factor VIII, a protein given by injection to help blood to clot. However, at the time, the US paid for blood donations and accepted them from high-risk groups, such as prisoners, drug addicts and sex workers. The products were made by pooling plasma from thousands of donors and concentrating it, and large batches were infected with HIV and hepatitis C.
“If you had said this had happened in the Victorian era, people might understand,” says Collins. “But it was the Eighties. It makes you wonder what else is going on.”
The contaminated products were used into the early Nineties, with some victims only discovering in recent years that they had been infected. In total, as many as 25,000 people in the UK could have contracted HIV or hepatitis C as a result of the error. To date, no one has been held accountable and victims have not been properly compensated. Thanks to Collins, that could soon change. With his watery blue eyes and moustache, he has the look of an old-fashioned private investigator. But thousands of people are now relying on this modest, unassuming man for justice. When we meet in Blackfriars, where the inquiry is being held, a steady stream of victims ask his thoughts on the day’s proceedings and invite him for drinks in the evening.
Collins had wanted to be a lawyer
‘They were deprived of compensation because it was all covered up’
since childhood, and co-founded Collins Solicitors with his wife, Lesley, in 1995, to take on cases other firms thought “too risky”. Their first case landed on their doorstep months later, when a train crashed in Watford, where their practice was based, killing one person and leaving 69 injured.
The firm acted for the victims in a corporate manslaughter case and went on to represent those affected by the Southall and Paddington rail crashes, as well as the Buncefield oil terminal fire. Collins’s greatest victory to date was the Corby toxic waste case of 2009, the first ever to establish a link between toxic waste and birth defects.
When Collins heard two victims of the blood scandal speak at an event at the beginning of 2017, he was shocked, having thought the disaster had been investigated years earlier. He invited them to the office and said: “We think we can help you.”
In a two-hour meeting at their office, Collins heard how Jason Evans’s father had died from Aids after being given contaminated Factor VIII, and how Max (not his real name) had been infected with both HIV and hepatitis C, then spent years living with the stigma. Collins was impressed by their extensive research: he would ask a question and Evans would fish out a document that answered it.
“They had been to all of the major law firms and a few of the minor ones, but they couldn’t get anyone to take it on,” he recalls. “We couldn’t believe it hadn’t been tried before and thought it would be a good case.”
“It was an absolute eureka moment,” says Max. “I’ve seen many good friends die and they have given me the drive to see this through. They deserve truth and justice. If it wasn’t for Des, we would probably be nowhere still.” Collins planned to overturn the decision of a group lawsuit from the Eighties, in which 1,000 victims were paid off, and show the Department of Health had misled claimants by withholding documents. In the following weeks, hundreds more victims came forward and his firm was soon representing 1,000 people.
Victims were sceptical: they had “seen all the lawyers in the world, and thought, ‘They can’t do anything for us’”, he says. The wider profession, meanwhile, regarded it as “just another mad scheme these guys have got – it’ll go nowhere”.
But Collins proved them wrong. In July 2017, he applied to take the case to the High Court. A week later, Theresa May announced a public inquiry. “I was euphoric,” says Max. “Des had given us the absolute determination to go after this.”
To date, Collins Solicitors has spent more than £1million on the inquiry, and is preparing to invest far more in the coming years.
The firm, which has more than doubled in size for the case, has requested additional funding from the inquiry, which currently gives it the equivalent of £10 per victim per month and a one-off £2,500 payment for taking a statement.
In the past five months, Collins has listened to the stories of hundreds
‘There were so many suicides. These families went into freefall’
of victims. On the morning of our interview, he learnt something new about a client when talking to his parents. The father admitted: “My son doesn’t know this, but my wife and I had a termination, because we couldn’t face having another haemophiliac child.” Collins says: “You had families disintegrating but still trying to protect one another. They lived with the guilt.”
The pain and anguish has devastated generations of families. Husbands infected their wives while trying for a baby; parents injected their children with contaminated Factor VIII, giving them HIV; and grandparents took their own lives because they could not cope.
Collins says he has wept on countless occasions, blindsided by a small detail in a tragic story: the family who couldn’t have their loved one buried because an undertaker refused to touch the body, or the parents whose three children attempted suicide. “There are so many suicides,” says Collins. “The families went into freefall.”
At the end of the first week of the inquiry, he warns that there will be thousands more “terrible stories” to come.
Collins, who has two grown-up sons, says he tries to leave work at the office, but there are times when he finds it difficult to sleep.
“There is nothing I can hear that will make me think, ‘I can’t go on’,” he says. It is, after all, the UK’S largest ever public inquiry and thousands of people are seeking answers to a scandal that has spanned half a century. “These victims need someone to speak for them. That’s what they’ve never had.”