Delay Is Not Neutral: Families Are Being Traumatised All Over Again

For the families waiting for infected blood compensation, delay is not merely frustrating. It is causing real and continuing harm.

Every unanswered email, unexplained pause and month spent waiting forces people to remain trapped inside the worst experiences of their lives. Families cannot draw a line beneath the past because the process created to provide recognition and justice keeps reopening it.

Many have already waited decades.

They have watched loved ones suffer. They have become carers, lost opportunities, fought for answers and attended an Inquiry that exposed catastrophic failures. Now, after the truth has finally been formally recognised, they are being asked to wait again.

“Test and learn” cannot excuse continuing harm

Families have repeatedly heard the language of “test and learn” used to explain the slow development of the compensation service.

Testing a new system may be necessary. Learning from mistakes is important. But victims and families should not be treated as test cases while those mistakes carry serious financial and psychological consequences.

“How long can ‘test and learn’ remain an acceptable explanation? At what point does learning have to become improvement?”

IBCA is not testing an ordinary administrative service. It is delivering compensation following one of the greatest treatment disasters in NHS history. The people using this system are already traumatised. Many are elderly, seriously ill or bereaved. Some fear they will die before their claim is completed.

That reality should create urgency—not another reason for delay.

A published strategy—but what is happening in practice?

IBCA has published an order for prioritising claims.

For deceased infected people, it says priority should be given to estates where a beneficiary has less than 12 months to live, followed by beneficiaries aged 75 or over, cases where no interim payment was received, and then claims ordered by the age of the oldest beneficiary.

On paper, this appears clear.

Yet families are reporting experiences that do not appear to follow a clear or understandable order. Some older beneficiaries remain waiting while apparently younger claimants are invited to begin. People compare experiences and are left wondering why one family has been contacted while another, seemingly higher-priority family, has heard nothing.

There may sometimes be information that families do not know about individual cases. But that cannot justify a system whose operation appears random to those waiting.

If IBCA has a strategy, it must show clearly how that strategy is being applied.

How many claims have been invited from each priority category? How many people aged over 75 are still waiting? How many estates received no interim payment? When exceptions are made, what rules permit them?

Transparency would not require IBCA to reveal anybody’s private information. It would simply allow families to understand whether the published priorities are being followed fairly.

Across numerous infected blood Facebook groups and online communities, the same concerns appear daily. Families describe contradictory information, unexplained delays, unclear invitation patterns and decisions that seem disconnected from the evidence submitted.

These are not isolated misunderstandings involving one dissatisfied claimant. They are recurring experiences being reported across the community—and they deserve to be properly recorded, investigated and answered.

Waiting has a human cost

Behind every outstanding claim is a person repeatedly checking their email, answering another call, searching for old documents or wondering whether they have been forgotten.

There are bereaved families who have spent years gathering evidence. There are people frightened that their age or health means time is running out. There are families watching apparently straightforward claims become delayed, questioned or rejected despite evidence they believe is clear and compelling.

This process does not take place separately from their trauma. It adds to it.

A compensation scheme created because institutions failed people must be extraordinarily careful not to repeat the patterns of the original scandal: delay, poor communication, inconsistent decisions and families being made to fight to have obvious truths accepted.

Accountability must happen now

IBCA says that it puts people at the heart of its service and treats everyone with respect and dignity. Those promises must be measured against families’ actual experiences.

How quickly are claims progressing? Are published priorities being followed? Are decisions consistent? Are families receiving full explanations? Is IBCA recording the psychological harm caused by its own delays?

These questions are not attacks on individual claim managers. They are necessary questions about the leadership, design and accountability of the system.

Families have already waited long enough for justice. They should not be expected to quietly accept an opaque process, unexplained differences or indefinite delay under the banner of “test and learn.”

We are recording what is happening. We are documenting the delays, the inconsistencies and the human consequences.

Because when a system prolongs the trauma it was created to address, that must become part of the public record too.

— The Unheard Voice