MPs told of serious concerns over Vaccine Damage Payments Scheme and its management by NHS business authority

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pandemic Response and Recovery has heard a catalogue of serious concerns from Professor Richard Goldberg about the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS), when he spoke to the Group about his research findings. The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) also came in for criticism over how it has been running the scheme since taking it over in 2021.

Professor Goldberg, of Durham University Law School, has spent over twenty years analysing the scheme and published a new study, to update his findings, in 2022. His latest research has uncovered what he believes are urgent questions over how claims are handled and a lack of transparency, especially since VDPS was transferred to the NHSBSA.

Speaking to the Group at the start of the second week of the Covid Inquiry’s Vaccines and Therapeutics (Module 4) hearings, Professor Goldberg’s key message was that VDPS needs sweeping reforms and reappraisal in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. He also cited a number of issues with NHSBSA, chiefly that the authority needs to radically improve its openness about the scheme and communications with the public.

Professor Goldberg, said: “Any reappraisal and reform should happen within a revised National Vaccine Policy, considering long term strategies, and not in isolation. The Scheme itself was set up under the Vaccine Damage Payments Act 1979 and the award amount has not increased since 2007. Claims may involve medical questions, but they are having to be proven on a balance of probability, which is a legal question and yet the initial process does not involve lawyers. In fact, lawyers are not involved in the decision-making process until following what is called a mandatory reversal review, an outcome remains rejected, and the claimant has a right of an appeal to a First-tier Tribunal. The Tribunal is comprised of a legally qualified chairman and 1 or 2 medical members. So there is a general absence of a legally qualified person’s involvement other than at Tribunal level.

“There’s also the thorny issues of proving causation and the 60% threshold for disablement. The greatest numbers of disallowed claims by far are because causation is not accepted. As of 30 November 2024 for Covid-19 vaccines that was 8,935 out of 9,351 disallowed claims. As of 30 November, the number of Covid-19 vaccine claims received was 17,519. Only 194 have been successful, a huge problem when an entire population was asked to take a vaccine. I have tried to understand why so many claims are being disallowed on the basis of causation but I am constantly thwarted by a troubling lack of transparency.

“For example, I was told by the Department for Work & Pensions that tribunal decisions I requested under the Freedom of Information Act have been ‘destroyed in line with Departmental document retention policy’ (FOI 2020/76078). This is despite disclosure of the fact that independent medical assessors make use of past tribunal decisions in their assessment. These cannot both be so and the decisions should be publicly available. Often, spurious data protection reasons are given for non disclosure. By contrast, in the States a lawyer is involved from the start of a claim, decisions are publicly and widely accessible with monthly updates provided. NHSBSA provides almost no information for the number of claims paid or dismissed in the UK. There are no statistics available and they will not even give information on vaccine makes. One consequence is vaccine hesitancy, ironically something VDPS was set up to help counter. Reform, not just of VDPS and the payment amount, but how NHSBSA runs it, are long overdue.”

Sir Christopher Chope MP, the Group’s vice-chair, said: “It is undoubtedly in the public interest to reform the VDPS, including increasing the £120,000 maximum payment in line with inflation since 2007. The disablement threshold of 60% is unfair and arbitrary.  It is clear that efficiency is also a huge issue and one that seems to have infected every aspect of the process, raising many questions about the capability of NHSBSA to administer the scheme. Through my campaign to reform VDPS, I have met and heard from many people who have been vaccine damaged or bereaved and the misery they endure is dreadful. It should not be happening and NHSBSA, as the administrative authority, has serious questions to answer.

“Having been told by their government to take the Covid-19 vaccines, many have then suffered serious injury or the death of a loved one. The vast majority of these people then find out that the scheme, set up to provide the only form of redress, does not deliver. Lack of causation or ruling that they are insufficiently disabled are far too frequent. It is understandable some no longer trust what they are told about vaccines.  The scheme needs urgent reform so that faith in vaccines can be restored.”

APPG co-chair Rt Hon Esther McVey MP added: “I was concerned to hear that one of the sources of information the VDPS relies on when considering claims is suspected adverse reaction reports submitted to the MHRA’s yellow card scheme. We know that the yellow card scheme suffers from chronic under-reporting, with the MHRA itself estimating that only 10% of serious reactions are reported.

“We also know from Freedom of Information requests that the MHRA “does not hold a process for the investigation and follow up of individual Yellow Card reports”, the retrieval of follow-up information from their database still requires manual extraction and that only 54% of deaths reported as possibly linked to exposure to one of the Covid-19 vaccines were followed up by the MHRA. This is simply not a reliable source of accurate and up-to-date information for medical assessors to be considering, when weighing up whether people, who have suffered life-changing injuries or bereaved, should be awarded payments or not. This is an unacceptable situation and the system needs radical improvement. It cannot be ignored any longer.”

Biography of the speaker:

Professor Richard Goldberg has been Chair in Law at Durham University since September 2012, previously teaching at the London School of Economics, King's College London, Queen Mary and Westfield College, the University of Birmingham and, most recently, the University of Aberdeen. His main research interests are concerned with product liability, tort law, intellectual property, medical law and pharmaceutical law.

He is currently on sabbatical, doing research into Vaccine Liability and Compensation. He recently gave a paper comparing the US and UK compensation schemes to the US Court of Federal Claims Conference in Washington.