[It’s an equivalent sum to the two NI tax give-aways already announced in the budget. No secret that this scale of compensation was on the horizon but priorities are priorities. – Owl]

…..With the report recommending compensation for the victims, it is on the current Tory government to take steps now to fix it. And it won’t be cheap. The rumoured figure of £10bn is, by government standards, an eye-watering sum. To put it into perspective, that is the same cost as the two national insurance cuts announced in the Budget, which came in at £10.3bn a year.

Extract from Katy Balls, political editor of The Spectator. inews

It means that in government and within the Tory party this comes with complications. After all, it was over contaminated blood that Rishi Sunak suffered his first ever Commons defeat as Prime Minister. Late last year, 30 of his own MPs voted with opposition parties to force the government to set up a body to administer compensation within three months of the bill becoming law….

…..The government had said there was a moral case for compensation, but wanted to wait for the outcome of the inquiry. “They wanted more flexibility,” explains one Tory insider.

While no one listening to the harrowing testimonies would deny that the victims of this scandal deserve compensation, finding that money and enacting it quickly risks hard choices which could affect potential autumn spending.

The concern was that finding the money could – in the words of one Tory politician – “make or break” another national insurance cut, specifically Hunt’s preferred plan of an autumn fiscal event to cut another 2p off national insurance. Inevitably, Tory MPs are asking whether it will eat up any headroom for more election-friendly spending.