Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told Times Radio this morning that for many years ministers chose to do nothing to help victims of the infected blood scandal. He said that he worked as a civil servant in the Treasury in the middle of the first decade of the century and that at the time ministers were deliberately ignoring the problem.

He explained:

I worked in the Treasury back in the mid 2000s and ministers back then were perfectly well aware of this and quite deliberately decided not to do things to help.

This really has been probably the most appalling miscarriage [of justice], and there have been quite a lot that I can think of, in my lifetime. This has been known about for a very, very, very long time and governments have quite deliberately decided not to do anything about it, quite deliberately decided not to offer this kind of compensation.

It is absolutely morally incomprehensible to me that this has taken so long.

So yes, absolutely the government can, should and must afford to do this. I mean, this is of course a one-off payment. So it’s different to an increase in spending which is permanent.

Asked to clarify who was in power at the time, Johnson said he was talking about the period when Gordon Brown was chancellor and Tony Blair was prime minister. But he said other governments were at fault. “Everyone in government since that moment, or indeed since before that moment, has been culpable,” he said.

GB News has described the Ofcom ruling against it today (see 10.51am and 11.01am) as an “alarming development” that should “terrify” anyone who believes in a free media. Here is its response to the judgment in full.

Ofcom’s finding against GB News today is an alarming development in its attempt to silence us by standing in the way of a forum that allows the public to question politicians directly.

The regulator’s threat to punish a news organisation with sanctions for enabling people to challenge their own prime minister strikes at the heart of democracy at a time when it could not be more vital.

GB News is the people’s channel. That is why we created a new broadcasting format, The People’s Forum, which placed the public – not journalists – firmly in charge of questioning Rishi Sunak.

Our live programme gave an independently selected group of undecided voters the freedom to challenge the prime minister without interference.

They did this robustly, intelligently, and freely. Their 15 questions, which neither we nor the prime minister saw beforehand, kept him under constant pressure and covered a clearly diverse range of topics. These were their words on the issues that mattered to them.

Among many other challenges, the prime minister was criticised over the ‘chronic underfunding’ of social care, the housing shortage, the likely failure of his government’s Rwanda plan, the betrayal of those injured by the Covid vaccine, and asked why the LGBT community should vote for him.

We cannot fathom how Ofcom can claim this programme lacked the “appropriately wide range of significant views” required to uphold due impartiality. It did not.

We maintain that the programme was in line with the broadcasting code.

Ofcom is obliged by law to uphold freedom of speech and not to interfere with the right of all news organisations to make their own editorial decisions within the law.

Its finding today is a watershed moment that should terrify anyone who believes, as we do, that the media’s role is to give a voice to the people of the United Kingdom, especially those who all too often feel unheard or ignored by their politicians.

We are proud to be the people’s channel and we will never stop fighting for the right of everyone in the UK, whatever their political persuasion, to have their perspective heard.

Here is the full statement from Ofcom saying it is considering imposing a sanction on GB News for breaking impartiality rules.

Here is an extract from the news release explaining why Ofcom concluded that the “People’s Forum” Q&A with Rishi Sunak broadcast by the channel broke impartiality rules.

In considering whether the programme was duly impartial, we took into account a range of factors, such as: the audience’s questions to the prime minister; the prime minister’s responses; the presenter’s contribution; and whether due impartiality was preserved through clearly linked and timely programmes. Our investigation found, in summary, that:

-while some of the audience’s questions provided some challenge to, and criticism of, the government’s policies and performance, audience members were not able to challenge the prime minister’s responses and the presenter did not do this to any meaningful extent;

-the prime minister was able to set out future policies that his government planned to implement, if re-elected in the forthcoming UK general election. Neither the audience nor the presenter challenged or otherwise referred to significant alternative views on these;

-the prime minister criticised aspects of the Labour party’s policies and performance. While politicians are of course able to do this in programmes, broadcasters must ensure that due impartiality is preserved. Neither the Labour party’s views or positions on those issues, or any other significant views on those issues were included in the programme or given due weight; and

-GB News did not, and was not able to, include a reference in the programme to an agreed future programme in which an appropriately wide range of significant views on the major matter would be presented and given due weight.

We also took into account that, during the course of our investigation, GB News said: it had purposefully not been aware of the questions which audience members would ask the prime minister; made an editorial decision that the presenter would not intervene or challenge views expressed; and that there were no other editorial means for alternative views to be included in the programme.

Here is Ofcom’s explanation of why it is taking action.

Given the very high compliance risks this programme presented, we found GB News’s approach to compliance to be wholly insufficient, and consider it could have, and should have, taken additional steps to mitigate these risks.

We found that an appropriately wide range of significant viewpoints were not presented and given due weight in the People’s Forum: The Prime Minister, nor was due impartiality preserved through clearly linked and timely programmes. As a result, we consider that the prime minister had a mostly uncontested platform to promote the policies and performance of his government in a period preceding a UK general election.

We have therefore recorded a breach of Rules 5.11 and 5.12 of the broadcasting code against GB News.

Ofcom considers GB News’s failure to preserve due impartiality in this case to be serious and – given its two previous breaches of these rules – repeated. We are therefore now starting our process for consideration of a statutory sanction against GB News.

And here is the full Ofcom report into the programme.

Ofcom, the media regulator, has said it is “starting the process for consideration of a statutory sanction against GB News” after finding that a “People’s Forum” featuring prime minister Rishi Sunak broke broadcasting due impartiality rules, PA Media reports.

A sanction would probably involve a fine (although other options are available to Ofcom).

The government expects to have spent at least £4.7bn on introducing post-Brexit border controls, which have been repeatedly hit by delays, the National Audit Office has warned. Jack Simpson has the story here.

Good morning. We have not been short of news recently about scandals involving grotesque failings by state organisations, and decades-long attempts to cover them up, and today we are going to get the final report from the inquiry into one of the worst of them all, the process that saw more than 30,000 NHS patients being infected with HIV or hepatitis C because they were treated with contaminated blood imported from the US. Here is our preview story by Rachel Hall, Matthew Weaver and Peter Walker about what to expect.

And here is an explainer from Haroon Siddique with background about the scandal.

A lot of the coverage this morning is focusing on the apology that Rishi Sunak is expected to deliver later. Hillsborough was a disaster that happened in 1989, the Waspi women state pension age scandal originated in decisions taken in the 1990s, and the Post Office Horizon scandal is about prosecutions that mostly took place in the first decade of this century, but the infected blood scandal goes back to the 1970s and so Sunak will be apologising, on behalf of the state, for things that happened in some cases before he was even born.

John Glen, the Cabinet Office minister dealing with the scandal on behalf of the government, has been giving interviews this morning. The government is expected to approve a compensation package worth more than £10bn, but he told Times Radio this morning that the government would not be giving full details today because it wanted to ensure that today the media focus is on the report, and on what victims have to say.

But he did not rule out the report leading to criminal proceedings being brought against some of the perpetrators. Asked if people might be taken to court, Glen told LBC:

If there’s clear evidence and there is a pathway to that, then it’s obviously something the government will have to address. I can’t be sure, but we’ve got to give these people justice.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

12.30pm: Sir Brian Langstaff publishes the final report of the infected blood inquiry. Campaigners will hold a press conference immediately afterwards, and Langstaff himself is due to speak.

1.15pm: Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, gives a speech to the Education World Forum in London.

3pm: David Cameron, foreign secretary, gives evidence to the Commons European scrutiny committee about “the UK’s new relationship with the EU”.

After 3.30pm: Rishi Sunak is expected to make a statement to MPs about the infected blood inquiry report.

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