Kathleen ‘Kitty’ Stewart in hospital

AN 84-year-old widow of the Royal Free tainted blood scandal is facing death without getting compensation due to government “delay tactics”.

Kathleen “Kitty” Stewart, who has lived in Camden Town all her life and worked on Meals on Wheels for Camden Council, has been discharged home from hospital with aggressive brain cancer.

As a widow of a husband and mother of a son who both died due to blood contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C – in one of the country’s worst scandals – is due around £250,000.

But “her claim will die with her”, one surviving son, Mark Stewart, told the New Journal this week.

“She is going to die with no justice, no apology from the Royal Free Hospital, and no closure,” he said.

“She had to watch and support both sons go through the horrific and brutal regime of the early interferon treatments and the horrendous symptoms that come with that with five failed attempts over seven years.

“She has then stood by and has had to witness her youngest infected son go through years of severe mental health issues, family breakdowns, pain, sorrow and so much worry andgrief – let alone the heartache that these deaths have caused her.

“She has then had to endure daily updates and reminders of this scandal whilst the public inquiry was happening, every single day.”

In July 2017, the government announced the Infected Blood Inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005, with Sir Brian Langstaff as its chair.

Over six years the inquiry looked at the circumstances in which men, women and children treated by the NHS in the UK were given infected blood and blood products in the 1970s and 1980s.

Children were used as guinea pigs in clinical trials of the blood that was taken from blood donors.

The Royal Free, which failed to properly screen the infected products, was at the centre of the scandal.

The government set a compensation framework and starting paying out victims in November – with a total pot of around £11.8billion – but just seven people have reportedly received been paid.

Kathleen with her sons Angus and Mark

Siblings and children are able to make claims to the Infected Blood Compensation Authority, a quango set up by the government to manage the compensation scheme.

Delays to setting up the process were criticised last year after the inquiry’s chair, Sir Brian, made recommendations for pay­ments to be made urgently.

Mr Stewart said he had been on to Holborn and St Pancras MP Keir Starmer’s office but was essentially “fobbed off”.

The Tainted Blood Widows group is also pressing for action on Ms Stewart’s, and many others’ behalfs as cam­paign groups say many relatives whose lives were blighted by the worst treatment disaster have died waiting for justice.

Mr Stewart said: “Mum worked for Meals on Wheels at Camden Council. We are now living together in the same house where I was born. That’s where she has come home to. Three weeks ago they told that she has an aggressive form of brain cancer.

“She has a right to a claim for herself as a wife and a mother for what she had to endure and suffer through the past 40-plus years, but as it stands, because of the govern­ment’s delay tactics, her claim will die with her.

“This family has been absolutely obliterated by this scandal, the NHS and the governments action’s. I will not let this happen without a fight and I will not sit back and let my mother die without closure.”

The Royal Free has apologised to all the victims of the tainted blood scandal in a statement. But it has not written to the victims individually.

Kathleen with her son Mark

An Infected Blood Compensation Authority statement said: “People have waited too long to receive the compensation they are due.

“The first set of regulations, which came into force in August 2024, allowed IBCA to make compensation payments to infected people. We started making payments in December. We’re on track to invite 250 people to make their claims by the end of March as we test the new compensation payment service.

“In the coming weeks, the second set of regula­tions will pass through parliament.

“We expect these regulations to allow us to open our compensa­tion service to many more eligible people, including many thousands of people, such as parents and children, whose lives were affected as a result of living with or caring for somebody who had been infected.”