After the biggest NHS scandal in its near 75-year history, why do victims still have to wait?

By the time the final reports see the light of day, most of those involved will not even be alive, writes Mary Dejevsky

The first move has been made towards compensating victims (PA Archive)

At last. More than four decades on from what is accepted to have been the greatest treatment disaster in the history of the NHS – the infected blood scandal – the first move has been made towards compensating victims.

Just think about it for a moment. Forty years have passed, and it is only now that those who suffered – often grievously – as a direct result of an NHS mistake (and the subsequent cover-up) have a realistic hope of some recompense.

We are not talking of a few isolated cases. As many as 25,000 people were infected, directly or indirectly, as a result of contaminated blood products. If they were in their twenties or thirties when they were infected, they are now in their sixties or seventies. For many, it is already too late. At least 2,400 have died from the HIV and Hepatitis C they contracted.