Compensate: Lord Owen calls for government action

Over 800 haemophiliacs died of Aids unnecessarily, the former health secretary Lord Owen said on Friday.

The crossbench peer is calling for the government to make "generous" compensation payouts to thousands of haemophiliacs infected with HIV and hepatitis between the mid-1970s and 1980s.

Lord Owen discloses today that thousands of people were infected with the diseases as a result of the NHS failing to spend money which had been set aside to provide a safe and self-sufficient blood supply.

As health secretary he earmarked several million pounds to ensure that Britain developed safe blood products.

Despite finding the cash, without his knowledge Britain continued to buy blood from the US - where the practice of paying for donations resulted in drug addicts, prisoners, prostitutes and alcoholics donating blood.

He tells Radio 4's "Face the Facts" programme: "I decided that if we invested enough, we could become self-sufficient so our blood would come only from British sources and we felt we would then be able to be more confident that it would not have contaminated blood in it."

If this had been achieved, Lord Owen believes many thousands of people would have escaped being infected with the blood-borne disease HIV and hepatitis.

"There is no doubt we should have been made self-sufficient and had we been made self-sufficient, a lot less people would be suffering from these viruses and illnesses now," he said.