I am grateful to the noble Baroness for those remarks, and I associate myself with all that she said about the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton. She, of all our colleagues, has been personally affected by this awful scandal, and has lost a husband in the course of it. I am by no means alone in having enormous admiration for her. Although I well understand why she cannot be with us today, following an exhausting day yesterday, we are all sorry not to see her.

The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, was right to express a view about how we should not inadvertently turn off the tap on innovation and medical advances in the health service by adopting an overly risk-averse approach. That would be the wrong thing to do. At the same time, it is fair to remind ourselves that, since the 1990s, there have been huge changes in the way that the NHS is regulated and the checks and balances that exist for clinical trials and the like.

Certainly, our blood supply is now one of the safest in the world. Over the last decade, the Government and system partners have delivered major initiatives to advance patient safety across the NHS. They include the patient safety strategy and the Patient Safety Commissioner —thanks to my noble friend Lady Cumberlege. The NHS is subject to greater oversight and regulation today—some have said that it is perhaps excessive, but I do not agree—but with a modern focus on patient safety and on evidence-based medicine, with a constitution brought in by the last Labour Government that sets out the rights of all of us to care and to treatment free of charge.

While I am the first to echo the guilt expressed by the Prime Minister yesterday, I think that we can look forward to a period of greater transparency and openness and greater patient safety in the light of the changes that have been made in recent years.