When Did Victims Become Customers?

Words reveal how an institution sees the people in front of it.

A patient can become a service user. A bereaved child can become an affected applicant. A victim can become a claimant. And, somewhere inside a corporate strategy, a human being can become a customer.

The Infected Blood Compensation Authority was established because people were harmed by treatment provided by the state, denied the truth and left waiting decades for recognition.

They are not shopping for a service.

They are not asking for a favour.

They are seeking redress for an injustice already proved by the Infected Blood Inquiry.

So when did victims become customers?

The language on the page

IBCA’s public-facing website usually refers to “people making a claim,” and it often speaks in compassionate terms. That matters and should be acknowledged.

But its leadership biographies and governance papers reveal a wider institutional vocabulary.

One senior biography describes a commitment to putting “customers” at the heart of service delivery. Another describes previous responsibility for delivering Universal Credit to approximately one million “customers” through 3,500 claim managers. Another refers to moving millions of HMRC customers to digital channels.

IBCA Board material discusses service integrity, fraud and error, value for money, performance management, quality assurance and “person making a claim outcomes.”

None of those terms is automatically improper. A public authority must protect money, prevent fraud, measure quality and run an effective service.

But language accumulates. It creates an atmosphere. It tells staff what matters and applicants what they are believed to be.

A customer can walk away

The word “customer” suggests choice.

A dissatisfied customer can use another bank, choose a different shop or cancel a subscription. A person making an infected blood compensation claim has no alternative compensation authority.

They cannot take their father’s estate to a competing scheme. They cannot ask another organisation to interpret the regulations. They cannot shop around for a claims manager with different powers.

IBCA holds a unique statutory role. The relationship is not commercial and it is not equal.

That makes accountability more important, not less.

Victim is not a dirty word

Some institutions avoid the word “victim” because not everyone identifies with it. Respecting individual preference is sensible.

But removing the word completely can also remove responsibility.

A “customer journey” has delays and touchpoints. A victim’s journey has grief, illness, stigma, lost income, family breakdown and an institution responsible for putting it right.

A “user need” can be placed in a backlog. A right to redress carries a moral obligation.

A “case” can be closed. The consequences of infected blood do not close when a payment is made.

The language of customer service may sound modern and neutral. Neutrality is not always appropriate when the underlying history was anything but neutral.

Fraud before trust?

IBCA must prevent fraudulent claims. Every legitimate claimant has an interest in ensuring compensation reaches the people entitled to it.

Its own Board papers refer to work with the Public Sector Fraud Authority and the Government Internal Audit Agency, fraud controls, service integrity and specialist fraud training for claim managers.

Those safeguards are not evidence that IBCA considers every claimant dishonest.

Yet they make another safeguard equally necessary: protection against genuine victims being treated through a fraud-first lens.

What training ensures that an incomplete record is understood in the context of institutional failure rather than treated as suspicious? What prevents inconsistency from being read as deception when trauma, illness and the passage of forty years may explain it? Who checks whether evidence requests are proportionate?

Fraud prevention should identify deception. It must not recreate the culture of disbelief documented by the Inquiry.

Value for whose money?

Public bodies are required to demonstrate value for money. IBCA is administering billions of pounds and must account for how public funds are used.

But infected blood compensation is not ordinary discretionary spending.

The money exists because the state caused or failed to prevent catastrophic harm and then delayed justice for decades.

Value for money cannot mean minimising awards that Parliament has authorised. Efficiency cannot mean pressing people through a system so quickly that individual harm is missed. Protecting the public purse cannot become more important than fulfilling the public debt.

The compensation budget is not generosity from the state. It is an unpaid bill presented by its victims.

Corporate language can hide human choices

Terms such as workflow, cohort, throughput and service release can make delays sound mechanical and inevitable.

But behind every delayed workflow is someone ageing. Behind every cohort is a family wondering why another group moved first. Behind every piece of missing evidence is a person who may have spent decades being denied access to the truth.

Administrative language is useful for managing work. It becomes dangerous when it sanitises the consequences of decisions.

A compensation authority should be able to describe its performance without making people disappear inside its terminology.

Change the language—and prove the culture changed with it

IBCA should review the language used across its internal strategies, staff training, Board reporting and public communications.

It should ask:

- Does this language recognise that compensation follows an established national injustice?

- Does it preserve dignity without erasing responsibility?

- Does fraud training include equal protection against institutional disbelief?

- Are performance measures balanced by the quality and humanity of the claimant experience?

- Do staff understand why applicants cannot be treated like ordinary customers or benefit claimants?

- Are infected, affected and bereaved people able to recognise themselves in the words IBCA uses?

This is not merely a debate about vocabulary.

Language becomes policy. Policy becomes behaviour. Behaviour becomes the experience of the person waiting at the other end of the telephone.

They are not customers purchasing a government service. They are victims collecting a debt the state should have paid long ago.

Sources IBCA: Biography of Chief of Staff Jaime Irvine IBCA: Biography of Chief Operating Officer Sindy Skeldon OBE IBCA: Biography of Director of Communications and Engagement Rachel Forster IBCA: Public Board papers, 6 May 2026 IBCA: About the Authority and its role