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As the clock ticked down towards 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March, Liam Bates kept refreshing his browser.

Over the preceding weeks, Marcegaglia, the stainless steel company whose long products division he headed up, had rushed to melt and ship as much metal as it could from its furnaces in Sheffield across to the east coast of America, ahead of the imposition of tariffs.

Stainless steel

UK and US industrially interlocked

Of all the varieties of steel, stainless steel – an alloy of iron and chrome, along with other elements like nickel, molybdenum and carbon – is among the most important. Unlike most other iron alloys, which can rust when they encounter oxygen, stainless steel has a passive film that protects it from corrosion and can even self-heal. That makes it essential not just for use in sinks and cutlery (where most people will encounter it on a daily basis) but, arguably even more essential, in surgical instruments, heavy machinery and the pipes and ducts out of sight but essential to keeping civilisation working.

The trick of how to make stainless steel in large quantities was discovered here in Sheffield by Harry Brearley, and while the laboratories he worked for shut down long ago, the furnace at Marcegaglia, in an industrial park just outside the city, can trace a continuous thread back to him. This furnace used to be owned by British Steel, the nationalised corporation responsible for most of Britain’s steel manufacture until the days of privatisation.

Marcegaglia steel furnace
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Marcegaglia steel furnace in Sheffield

Ever since the invention of stainless steel, Britain has melted, cast and exported vast quantities of the stuff to America. For all that the US has a sizeable stainless steel sector, the two countries’ stainless sectors have nonetheless been industrially interlocked since the days of Henry Ford. You can see it in the way Marcegaglia functions.

It melts down scrap in its electric arc furnace in Sheffield – an enormous cauldron whose electrodes create a storm of lightning that consumes the same power as a sizeable northern city – and adds the relevant alloy ingredients to form a long, heavy metallic bar, a billet as it’s known. That billet is then shipped across the Atlantic to the company’s other site, where the billets are processed into bars that are then sold into the North American market. It is a single economic organism, split only by an ocean.

But today that ocean and that cross-country split have become an enormous problem. The last time Donald Trump imposed tariffs on steel imports, back in 2018, so-called “intermediate” products like the billet made by Marcegaglia and then processed in America were excluded from the duties. This time around, the initial tariff rules had no such exemptions. The upshot was that any steel arriving in American ports after 12.01am Eastern Standard Time on 12 March – including Marcegaglia’s half-finished stainless billets – would incur hefty 25% tariffs.

A race against time

All of which was why Liam Bates had raced to get as much steel as possible into the US before that deadline. But as he refreshed his browser in the run-up to that deadline, he noticed two straggling shipments, still stuck on the Atlantic. The two ships, the Eva Marie and the Atlantic Star, were, between them, carrying about $12m of steel and they had been due to dock in the US on 10 or 11 March. If so, they would have avoided having to pay those 25% tariffs. But now storms and squalls were spreading across the North Atlantic. Would they stray into the ships’ path, disrupting shipping?

If the cargo arrived late, it would obliterate any margin the company hoped to make on its steel. And since those bars were destined for Marcegaglia’s own plant, the company would have to pay all those costs itself (tariffs are technically paid by the importer). Somehow, Bates had found himself helplessly witnessing an unexpected collision of politics and weather – with profound commercial consequences.

Of all the metal items Britain exports to the US, stainless steel is by far and away the biggest category. And the vast majority of that steel comes from the melt shop at Marcegaglia. But the quandary facing Liam Bates, and those companies he sells to in the US, helps illustrate the difficulties of economic policy-by-tariff.

Americans will see cost of most things go up

The prevailing theory behind the White House measures is that by raising the price of all imported metals, it will encourage domestic producers to build new production. It will help the US to reindustrialise – or so says Donald Trump. And in the long run, that might well prove right. Already, metals producers are raising money, promising to restart old, mothballed smelters. After all, if your main overseas competitors have seen their prices rise by 25%, that’s quite a competitive opportunity.

The problem is: building industrial production takes time. Marcegaglia itself is planning to replace its old furnace with a newer model, but the planning process has already taken years; the construction itself will be measured in months if not years too. In other words, even if everything goes to plan, America is very unlikely to replace imported steel with domestic production within the period of Donald Trump’s term as president.

In the meantime, American consumers will see the cost of pretty much everything going up. After all, steel – ignored or dismissed as it sometimes is – is the single most important metallic substance in the world. If something isn’t made of steel it’s made in machines made of steel. And lifting some of those steel prices by 25% will travel like an economic tidal wave through US supply chains.

UK flooded with cheap imported steel

The tidal wave is already washing back elsewhere too. With so much steel now unable to get into the US at a decent price, exporters are redeploying shipments elsewhere. All of a sudden countries like the UK are seeing a flood of cheap imported steel – good news in the short run for consumers, but disastrous for what is left of Britain’s domestic industry.

Sheffield Marcegaglia steel furnace

As the deadline approached and Bates nervously refreshed his live vessel tracking map, disaster struck. The squalls across the Atlantic mounted and the Eva Marie and Atlantic Star slowed nearly to a halt. By the time midnight struck and the tariffs came into place, the two vessels were still many miles off the US coast. They had lost the race. The upshot was Marcegaglia would have to pay around $4m in tariffs – about £3m.

That a company was struck with a somewhat arbitrary fee simply to pass goods from one of its factories to another might be among the most egregious examples of the collateral economic damage wrought by trade barriers, but it is likely to be the first of many perverse episodes, with consequences all around the world. For steel is not the only metal to be hit with tariffs. If anything, the drama is even greater for another metal: aluminium.

Aluminium

The world’s biggest factory – hidden in Scotland

Here’s a riddle for you: what is the biggest factory in the world?

You’re probably thinking of vast, cavernous car production lines in Michigan, of shipyards in Korea or steelworks in China. But there’s a strong case to be made that the world’s biggest factory is instead to be found deep in the Highlands of Scotland.

Not that it looks anything like a factory. To the untrained eye, it looks, instead, like heather, forests and bubbling burns of water trickling into lochs. But the 114,000 acres of estates in Lochaber and Badenoch – the third biggest rural estate in Scotland – play a crucial role in helping produce one of the most important substances in the world.

Part of the side of the mountain running into an enormous hydroelectric power station for Fort William aluminium plant
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Part of the side of a mountain running into a hydroelectric power station for Fort William aluminium plant

The Fort William aluminium plant sits under the shadow of Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the United Kingdom. Once upon a time, it was just one of a constellation of smelters dotted around Scotland, that made this country, all told, one of the world’s biggest aluminium producers.

For all that it is very prevalent in the earth’s crust, aluminium used to be one of the world’s most precious metals – so much so that no one had even laid eyes on it until the 19th century. When he wanted to impress his guests, Napoleon III served them dinner not on gold plates but on aluminium.

An extraordinary metal

Why? Because aluminium is very difficult – even harder than iron – to convert from the ores you find in the ground into its metallic form. Burn iron ore hot enough, in the right kind of furnace alongside the right kind of charcoal or coal, and you eventually smelt out a form of metal. But aluminium needs a different kind of force to be persuaded to loosen its bonds and form into a pure metal – the force of electricity.

So only when the Hall-Heroult process, which allows you to smelt aluminium via electrolysis of alumina (a processed version of the bauxite you get out of the ground), was invented in 1886 did aluminium become a widely available metal. Few people talk these days about the Hall-Heroult process, but it was a breakthrough of earth-shattering proportions. Aluminium is an extraordinary metal – strong but light. And those qualities make it essential in aeronautic deployments. No aluminium, no planes.

Fort William aluminium plant
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Fort William aluminium plant

It is no coincidence that the Wright Brothers’ plane at Kitty Hawk had an engine made out of aluminium. Steel would have weighed the glider down too much. And it’s no coincidence that powered flight happened shortly after aluminium became widely available. Without the Hall-Heroult process, the world would have been a very different place.

While the process wasn’t dreamt up in the UK, British industrialists rapidly embraced it, building smelters all over the country. But the catch with aluminium is that you can’t smelt it without a big and (this is important) very reliable supply of power. Turn off the power to those enormous carbon electrodes inside an aluminium smelter and in a matter of hours the metal at its base will solidify, effectively destroying it. More than nearly any other industrial process, this is not something you can just switch off willy-nilly, which helps explain why smelters aren’t typically dependent on variable power sources like wind and solar.

It also explains why, throughout history, these plants have been seen as some of the most important industrial locations throughout the world. The Fort William plant provided most of the aluminium used in Spitfires during WWII. It was repeatedly targeted by the Luftwaffe – indeed there is an old German bomb kept as a memento just near the turbines that power the cells here.

Fort William aluminium dam
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Fort William aluminium dam

Some of the world’s earliest smelters were powered by hydroelectricity – most notably the ones which drew their power from the Niagara Falls plants near Buffalo, New York. But the Fort William plant was subtly but importantly different. Those other hydro plants would typically piggyback off a big dam generating power from a big river – such as the ones you find in the US or Canada, or the fjords of Norway. But none of Britain’s rivers is quite powerful enough or with a reliable enough flow to provide that kind of uninterrupted power.

Radical design

So the designers of the Fort William plant did something radical. They bought up vast stretches of the countryside around Ben Nevis (including Ben Nevis itself). And within that estate, they built a series of dams to collect the rainwater trickling down from local watersheds. Those dams weren’t there to generate power for homes – they were there to collect the water and channel it through a series of tunnels, running 16 miles through the hills and through the flanks of Ben Nevis. Then the water, collected from those 114,000 acres, feeds five pipes running down the side of the mountain which run into an enormous hydroelectric power station.

Fort William aluminium dam

There are many aluminium smelters around the world and many hydroelectric dams. But none are quite like this one. The point being that without the estate, without all those trickling streams and heather-covered watersheds, the plant here simply wouldn’t function. It is all part of a single ecosystem.

These days the plant is connected to the national grid, meaning it also serves another function: balancing. This comes back to one of the dysfunctions of the grid: it doesn’t have enough high-voltage lines connecting Scotland, with all its wind farms, and the south. So on windy days, when there’s too much power in Scotland, instead of curtailing those farms and wasting the electricity, the plant can suck in extra power from the Scottish section of the grid and leave its water where it is as a sort of battery.

Competition from China

The problem the plant has faced is that these days aluminium is a commodity metal. And it’s becoming harder and harder to compete with the cheap metal being exported from China. China dominates the global supply of the metal, in large part because its suppliers benefit from cheap energy and generous government subsidies – neither of which are available in the UK. As the years have gone by, the workers at Fort William have watched as, one by one, every other plant in Britain was shuttered. Rumours still abound that they may eventually be next.

Fort William aluminium plant
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Fort William aluminium plant

And, much as for Marcegaglia down in Sheffield, the tariffs on aluminium will only make life tougher for Alvance, the unit of Liberty House – part of Indian-born Sanjeev Gupta’s business empire – that now owns the Fort William plant. Arguably, the impact could be even greater. The last time Donald Trump imposed tariffs on aluminium back in 2018, the rate he chose was 10%. The difference with the steel tariff level (which was 25% then and now) reflected the fact that the US imported far more aluminium than steel. Imposing severe extra costs on it would, the White House worried, cripple the American aerospace and car businesses dependent on the metal. No such concern this time around. The tariff is 25%.

Quite how that will affect the plant here in the Scottish Highlands remains to be seen. After all, Alvance itself doesn’t sell anything directly to the US, sending its large slabs of metal to other firms in England which process and roll them into sheets and specialised components, some of which end up in the US. Perhaps, as the defence industry ratchets up in the coming years, more of that aluminium will be used by domestic industry. But what’s to stop UK manufacturers doing what they’ve been doing for years, and simply opting for the cheapest metal available, which usually comes from China? Either way, life for the last remaining aluminium plant in the UK is about to get harder, not easier.

But while the main upshot of the trade war building across the Atlantic and the Pacific will be to make both sides worse off – that, at least, is the prediction from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – that doesn’t mean there won’t be some beneficiaries in this country. For a small but important example, let’s travel from the far north of Britain to its far south.

Tungsten

UK has one of its biggest resources in world

Drive across Dartmoor, the windswept national park in the heart of Devon, and every so often you come across the remains of an old tin mine. At Fox Tor you find the remains of alluvial mining; there is Golden Dagger Mine, which ran all the way to the 1930s, as well as the hollow stone chimney of the pumping house at Wheal Betsy.

Hemerdon tungsten mine
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Hemerdon tungsten mine

For much of the ancient era, tin – which when mixed with copper creates the alloy bronze – was what we would today call a “critical mineral”, essential for the production of the strong tools and weapons of the Bronze Age. And for centuries, the majority of Europe’s tin came from Cornwall and Devon.

That, of course, is long in the past. But just on the outskirts of Dartmoor is a site that could – just could – make this an important site for critical minerals once again. For here, beneath the soil of southwest England, is one of the world’s biggest resources of tungsten.

Tungsten among few substances on everyone’s list

Tungsten is among the 21st century’s most important critical minerals. Nearly every country has a list of these materials – the kinds of things they need to make their most important products – and the members of those lists vary by region. But tungsten is one of the few substances that feature in everyone’s list. The hardest metal in existence, with the highest melting point, it is essential in the production of hard steel tools, weapons, armour and as the electrodes inside semiconductor circuits. If you are making electronics you need tungsten. If you are going to war you need tungsten.

Hemerdon tungsten mine

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the main heyday for this mine, which contains plenty of tin as well as tungsten, was in the First and Second World Wars. Much as the Fort William plant provided aluminium for British Spitfires, Hemerdon provided the tungsten and tin needed for the weapons Britain used to fight the Nazis. But ever since then, its history has been chequered, to say the least.

It went into hibernation for decades, a sleep broken for only a single day during the Korean War. Then, a few years ago, investors tried to get it up and running again. They built a vast processing plant and began to mine the metal. But by 2019 the operation had run out of money and imploded. All that was left was an even bigger hole in the ground, a large tailings dam for waste and a hangar filled with processing equipment.

In part, the reason Hemerdon went belly-up that time was because the company made the mistake miners often make: they misjudged the type of ore they were expecting to grind through, meaning their processing plant was far less efficient than it could have been. But an even bigger challenge came back to something that will sound familiar: they were trying to compete with China.

China dominates world tungsten production – even more so than for aluminium and steel. It essentially controls the global market and, just as importantly, the tungsten price. Anyone trying to sell tungsten is contending with Chinese prices which can yo-yo for reasons no one can entirely explain. That makes it fiendishly difficult to compete.

But in recent years, new investors have begun to put fresh funds into the Hemerdon mine, hoping history will not repeat itself and this time around it can exploit that enormous ore resource. And there are at least a couple of reasons to believe (famous last words in finance) that “this time might be different”.

The first is that, in retaliation against Donald Trump’s latest metal tariffs, China has begun to put export limits on tungsten. How this will work in practice remains unclear (remember that like most markets China controls, the way tungsten sales function is almost completely opaque) but if it encourages domestic buyers to look for local suppliers, that could help the mine to find buyers. After all, in theory, it could produce a few thousand tonnes of the metal each year, which would instantly leapfrog Britain to become the world’s second or third-biggest producer (albeit a long way down from China).

Supplies matter more than ever

The second big shift comes back to defence. With the world remilitarising, all of a sudden tungsten supplies matter more than ever. And since defence suppliers pay outsized attention to where metals come from, again, that might allow a British tungsten mine to succeed where predecessors have failed.

Add to this the fact that the mine itself is nearly ready to be exploited and that the new owners reckon they’ve ironed out the problems that beset their predecessors, and it’s a compelling case. They think they could be getting metal out of the ground as soon as next year.

But those overarching challenges haven’t gone away. And nor has another, bigger problem facing the entire industry, not just in the UK but – perhaps even more so – in the US. How can you plan in a world where you just don’t know what’s coming out of the White House in the next few days, let alone the next few years?

Consider: imagine you’re a stainless steel producer or an aluminium smelter in the US. Those 25% tariffs mean all of a sudden in theory you have a competitive advantage over anyone shipping metal into the country. All of a sudden, there’s a strong case to build a smelter or a stainless steel melting shop. So you get to work looking for backers.

Uncertainty creates challenges

But building a plant like this takes time. You need to find a site, connect it to high-voltage power, and build the facilities and all the necessary infrastructure. Best case scenario: it might take a couple of years, but even that is ambitious. And as you contemplate this and map out your plans, those backers will ask you the same nagging question you’ve been asking yourself: sure, the economics of an aluminium smelter might add up today; but what if the president changes his mind tomorrow, or next year? What if those tariffs are pulled by the next president? Then, all of a sudden, the sums very much don’t add up.

All of which is to say, uncertainty around tariffs is a challenge not just for those companies hoping to ship products to America, but for American firms hoping to benefit from this trade war. And bear in mind metals are only the first chapter of what could be a long saga, which ends up engulfing all corners of American trade. These are unpredictable times, however you look at it.

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Labour MPs form new group as they urge prime minister to focus on living standards to help ward off Reform

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Labour MPs form new group as they urge prime minister to focus on living standards to help ward off Reform

A group of Labour MPs has urged Sir Keir Starmer to do more to tackle the rising cost of living amid fears the party could lose the next election to Reform.

The MPs are launching a new splinter group, the living standards coalition, to shift the focus to everyday concerns such as food, energy bills and housing.

Politics latest: Former Tory chairman defects to Reform

In a letter to the prime minister, the group’s members warned that one question would be on the mind of voters at the next election: “Did this Labour government make me better off?”

“After 14 years of living in a no-growth economy and with some of the highest bills in Europe, our constituents are struggling to make ends meet,” they said.

“More of them are turning away from democracy and towards populism as they can’t afford a decent life.”

The coalition is the latest splinter group to form since the party’s landslide election victory a year ago.

More on Labour

Other groups include the Labour growth group, which focuses on delivering economic growth, and MPs in Red Wall constituencies in the North who are alive to the threat Reform poses in their seats.

A YouGov poll last month found Reform was on track to get the most seats if an election were held this year – with combined support for the Conservatives and Labour collapsing to less than half of the national vote.

While the MPs stress they are supportive of the actions the government has taken so far, the forming of a new group could be interpreted as a sign of restlessness in the parliamentary party, especially given the fallout of last week’s botched welfare vote.

In the letter, first reported by The Guardian, the MPs write: “We are here to support your efforts to go further and faster on raising living standards. We come from every corner of our party.

“To raise living standards, we support government interventions that will help to increase incomes and lower costs.

Read more:
What is a wealth tax?
Controversial welfare bill passes

“We welcome interventions that will raise incomes. We welcome investment in labour- intensive building, education, and healthcare jobs that will raise living standards through employment. We welcome the Employment Rights Bill that will get wages rising.”

They added: “We know that some will try to stop us raising living standards.

“They will try to block us from building the affordable housing and windfarms we need to get bills down. They oppose the way we have raised revenue from the very wealthiest to invest in childcare and our NHS.

“We are glad you are keeping this government’s focus on raising living standards. We stand in support of you. It is the most important issue to our constituents and the country.”

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Parents tell ‘untold stories’ of how their ‘hero’ daughters survived Southport attack

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Parents tell 'untold stories' of how their 'hero' daughters survived Southport attack

The parents of survivors of the Southport attack have revealed the “untold stories” of how their “hero” children escaped.

Axel Rudakubana, 18, murdered Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, in what the chairman of the public inquiry Sir Adrian Fulford called “one of the most egregious crimes in our country’s history”.

Eight children were injured along with two adults at a Taylor Swift-themed class in the Merseyside seaside town on 29 July last year, while 15 others escaped without physical injuries.

The surviving victims and their families have been granted anonymity during the inquiry, with one girl referred to as C3. Her father was the first to give evidence at Liverpool Town Hall on Wednesday.

Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King were murdered in an attack at a Taylor Swift-themed class.
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Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King were murdered in the attack

Reading a statement on behalf of him and his wife, he told how their daughter was the first girl to escape the scene by running from the Hart Space building and hiding behind a parked car before jumping through an open car door.

“Our nine-year-old daughter was stabbed three times in the back by a coward she didn’t even see,” he said.

“Although she didn’t know what was happening – she knew she had to run. She ran out of the studio door, down the stairs, and out of the building.”

Read more: Southport inquiry as it happened

He said she can be seen “looking scared, confused and pained” in CCTV footage of the incident, adding: “It was troubling for us to see what she had to go through, before either of her parents had arrived at the scene.”

“We are so thankful and proud that despite being critically injured, she was able to make the decisions she did in that terrible moment,” he said.

The girl’s father said his daughter “continues to astound” them with the way she dealt with the attack and her recovery, saying: “It has been inspiring for us to witness.”

Chair Sir Adrian Fulford sitting inside the hearing room at Liverpool Town Hall, ahead of the start of the inquiry.
Pic: PA
Pic: PA
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Inquiry chair Sir Adrian Fulford at Liverpool Town Hall. Pic: PA

He said she has difficulty sleeping, experiences flashbacks, looks over her shoulder scanning for potential danger when she leaves the house, has a fear of loud noises and has to turn off some songs when they come on the radio.

“Our daughter knows that she is loved,” he said.

“It is through this support and love that she will continue to thrive. We couldn’t be prouder of her. She is our hero.”

Stabbed 33 times

The parents of a girl referred to as C1 told how their “beautiful, articulate, fun-loving little girl” was stabbed 33 times.

After being attacked she escaped the building, but Rudakubana was seen dragging her back inside in CCTV footage played during his sentencing hearing, which drew gasps in court, before she was stabbed 20 more times.

“That is how she became known in this nightmare. The girl that was dragged back in,” her mother said.

Police at the scene of the Southport attack on 29 July 2024. Pic: PA
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Police at the scene. Pic: PA

Southport

She thanked the teachers who escaped to call police and flag down help but said: “The most painful of truths for us though, and what has been most devastating to come to terms with, is that there were no adults to help during both of her attacks.

“She was only supported by other children. The courage and strength she found leaves me crushed, but in complete awe.”

She added: “It is these untold stories of remarkable strength and bravery that are missing when we have heard other accounts of this day.”

The mother said the “hours and days that followed the attack were a living hell” and her daughter’s memories – including a concert of her “idol” Taylor Swift – have “been forfeited to make space for the trauma that she carries”.

“We tell her she was brave. How proud we are that she was able to help other girls. How her strength makes us feel strong. How important what she did that day was. She is her own hero. She may be a survivor of this attack, but she is still trying to survive this, every single day,” she said.

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‘We need to understand what went wrong’

Attack ‘changed everything’

The mother of a girl referred to as C8 said she was “like any other seven-year-old little girl”, “with an incredible energy” and “full of life”.

But in a statement read out by a legal representative, she said the attack last year “changed everything” when she got a “panicked phone call” from a friend’s mother, who couldn’t find the girls.

“That moment, the sound of fear in her voice and the panic I felt will never leave me,” she said.

“I rushed to the scene and what I saw is something no parent should ever see. My daughter had sustained serious physical injuries including a stab wound to her arm and a cut to her face and chin.”

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‘We don’t want Elsie forgotten’

Read more from Sky News:
Infected blood victims ‘waiting to die in limbo’

The fly-tippers turning trash into cash

She said her daughter “remembers the attack vividly” and later told her “she thought it had to be fake, because she couldn’t believe something that terrible could really be happening”.

“Where she was once eager to go off with her friends, she now needs my support if it is somewhere public or unknown,” she said.

“Simple days out now need a level of safety planning that we would never have considered before.”

‘Constant flashbacks’

The mother of a girl referred to as Q, who escaped without being physically injured, told how she arrived to collect her daughter to find “children running from the building, screaming and fearing for their lives”.

In a statement read to the inquiry by a legal representative on her behalf, she said it was “the most horrific experience of my life”.

“What I saw on that day will stick with me forever, I constantly have flashbacks and relive what happened,” she said.

She said her daughter has become “very withdrawn” since the attack and has asked her parents, “How will I ever be normal again?”

Rudakubana was jailed for a minimum of 52 years in January and is being investigated over an alleged attack on a prison officer at Belmarsh prison in May.

The public inquiry, announced by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in January, is looking into whether the attack could or should have been prevented, given what was known about the killer.

Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff, had contact with police, the courts, the youth justice system, social services and mental health services, and was referred to the government’s anti-extremism Prevent scheme three times before the murders.

A rapid review into his contact with Prevent found his case should have been kept open and that he should have been referred to Channel, another anti-terror scheme.

C1’s mother said: “She deserves the truth, she deserves accountability. She deserves an apology. Our girls deserve an apology.

“Backed up by the promise that changes will be made and this will not be allowed to happen again.”

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Infected blood victims are ‘waiting to die in limbo’ – with hundreds still waiting for compensation

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Infected blood victims are 'waiting to die in limbo' - with hundreds still waiting for compensation

Victims of the infected blood scandal say they are “waiting to die in limbo”, with just hundreds having received compensation to date.

For decades, more than 30,000 NHS patients were knowingly given infected blood products, and more than 3,000 people died as a result. Survivors are left living with long-term health complications, including HIV and hepatitis.

An inquiry into the scandal, which published its final report in May 2024, accused the NHS of a “pervasive cover-up”. Recompense payments for the victims and survivors were ordered, with the government setting aside £11.8bn to do this.

Earlier this year, the inquiry was reopened to examine the “timeliness and adequacy” of the compensation, and its report – published today – has accused the scheme of “perpetuating” harm.

Just 2,043 people have been asked to start a claim, 616 have been made offers, and 430 of those have been paid.

“For decades, people who suffered because of infected blood have not been listened to. Once again, decisions have been made behind closed doors, leading to obvious injustices,” says Sir Brian Langstaff, chair of the Infected Blood Inquiry.

“It is not too late to get this right. We are calling for compensation to be faster, and more than that, fairer.”

In his latest 210-page report, Sir Brian says yet more people have been harmed by the way they have been treated by the scheme.

It highlights how the compensation scheme was drafted without any direct involvement from the people most affected – the expert group that advised the government on how financial support should be delivered was not allowed to take evidence or hear from any victim of the infected blood scandal.

“Obvious injustices” within the scheme include the exclusion of anyone infected with HIV prior to 1982 and the unrealistic requirements for proving psychological harm.

How did the infected blood scandal happen?

Between 1970 and the early 1990s, more than 30,000 NHS patients were given blood transfusions, or treatments made using blood products, which were contaminated with hepatitis C or HIV.

The infected blood was used because the NHS was struggling to meet the domestic demand for blood products, so sourced around 50% of them from abroad, including the US.

But much of the blood had been taken from prisoners, drug addicts and other high-risk groups who were paid to give blood.

Blood donations in the UK were not routinely screened for hepatitis C until 1991, 18 months after the virus was first identified.

As a result, more than 3,000 people have died, and survivors have experienced lifelong health implications.

In 2017, the government announced a statutory inquiry into the scandal to examine the impact on families, how authorities responded, and the care and support provided to those affected.

The Infected Blood Inquiry published its findings last year and a multi-billion-pound compensation scheme was announced in its wake.

This included payments for a group of people with the blood clotting disorder haemophilia, who were subjected to “unethical research” while at school and included in secret trials to test blood products.

HIV infections before 1982

The current scheme means any person infected with HIV before 1 January 1982 will not be compensated – something the latest report calls “illogical and unjust”.

The rule “completely misunderstands (or ignores) the central fact that blood products used [before this date] were already known to carry a risk of a dangerous virus – Hepatitis”, the report says.

The rule appears to have been made based on legal advice to the government.

One mother says her daughter was invited to claim compensation, only to be told she was likely “ineligible” because she had been infected prior to 1982.

“To reach this stage of the proceedings to be faced with the unbearable possibility of her claim being declined is yet another nightmare to be somehow endured… This unbearable and intolerable situation is cruel and unjust,” she says in the report.

Read more:
Ten victims of infected blood scandal to receive total of around £13m
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One person who is not named in the report said: “It feels as if we are waiting to die in limbo, unable to make any progress in our lives and fearing that as our health declines, we may not ever get the compensation we deserve.”

Analysis by Sky correspondent Laura Bundock: Victims’ painful battle continues – and in some cases time is running out

This is another deeply damning report into the infected blood scandal.

We now know the damage and suffering caused by the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS is far from over.

So many were promised long-overdue compensation. But those infected and affected by the scandal are still being harmed by delays, injustices, and a lack of transparency.

Over a year since his final inquiry report was published the chair, Sir Brian Langstaff, does not hold back in his criticism of the compensation scheme.

He finds the system sluggish, slow and difficult to navigate.

What was set up to help the infected blood community, failed to properly involve victims of the scandal. Opportunities were missed opportunities to consult, and decisions were made behind closed doors.

The end result is an unfair, unfit system leaving people undercompensated. What’s worse, very few have received any money. And in some cases, time is running out.

This additional report makes yet more recommendations. Sir Brian is clear that despite a bad start, it’s not too late to get things right. What he says is an important moment of vindication for the victims, who’d felt their voices were being ignored.

They’ve campaigned and fought for this inquiry for decades. Most assumed the battle was over once Sir Brian’s report was published last year. But despite promises and pledges from politicians, their anger and upset hasn’t gone away.

The government says it’s taking steps to speed up the process. For victims, trust in the authorities remains low.

It will take more than warm words to restore faith, as they continue through the painful struggle for justice.

Unrealistic expectations

The report also highlights the unrealistic evidence requirements for someone proving psychological harm.

The current regulations require a consultant psychiatrist to have diagnosed and treated someone, either as in-patient, or in hospital for six months.

But the report says, at the time the scandal was unfolding, “consultant psychiatric services were not the norm across every part of the country”.

“It would be wrong to set a requirement for compensation that such services be accessed when it was not a practical proposition that they could be.”

Those infected were also unlikely to have told even close friends and family about their diagnosis due to the stigma and ostracism.

Therefore, the expectation of having received medical care “would have involved revealing to an unknown clinician what that person dared not reveal, especially if there was a chance that it might leak out”.

Other exclusions

The report also highlighted other exclusions within the compensation scheme.

It says the “impacts of infection with Hepatitis is not being fully recognised in the scheme as it stands”. The scheme also fails to recognise the devastating impacts of interferon, used to treat Hep C. The vast majority of people who received interferon suffered severely, both psychologically and physically.

The compensation regulations also withdraw support for a bereaved partner if the infected person dies after 31 March this year. The argument being that they are eligible for compensation in their own right as an “affected” person.

But removing these payments immediately after death means infected persons “see themselves as worthless and [ignites] fears of leaving partners destitute”.

One man reports being denied compensation as victims of medical experimentation because – despite having evidence it took place – the hospital where he was infected was not named in the regulations.

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Infected and experimented on

The report issued a number of recommendations to speed up the process.

It says people should be able to apply for compensation, rather than wait to be asked.

The compensation authority should also progress applications from different groups at the same time, giving priority to those who are most ill and older, or who have never received any form of financial support.

It also says anyone who has evidence of being the victim of medical experiments should be compensated for it, regardless of where they were treated.

The report calls for more transparency and openness, as well as involvement from those infected and affected.

Support groups react to latest report

Kate Burt, Chief Executive of the Haemophilia Society, said the government’s “failure to listen to those at the heart of the contaminated blood scandal has shamefully been exposed by the Infected Blood Inquiry yet again”.

“Now government must take urgent action to put this right by valuing those impacted by this scandal through a fair and fast compensation settlement,” she says. “Only then can the infected blood community move on from the past and finally focus on what remains of their future.”

A lawyer advising some 1,500 victims says some of the recommendations “can and should be implemented immediately”.

Des Collins, senior partner at Collins Solicitors, says: “We also urgently need transparency of the timetable for the affected and an acceleration of the payment schedule to them.”

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