Campaign overview
Turning evidence into action
Factor 8 was an independent campaign organisation established in 2016 for people infected and affected by contaminated Factor VIII and Factor IX blood products.
Founded by Jason Evans, the campaign combined documentary research, Freedom of Information, litigation, media investigations and political engagement. Its purpose was not simply to raise awareness of the infected blood scandal, but to secure practical outcomes: a statutory public inquiry, institutional accountability and comprehensive compensation. Factor 8 formed part of a much longer chain of campaign efforts led by infected people, bereaved family members and their supporters across the United Kingdom over three decades.
This page records Jason’s work as Factor 8’s founder and former director. He stood down from the organisation and from active campaigning in January 2025.
The campaign’s objectives
Truth
To secure a UK-wide statutory public inquiry capable of compelling evidence, questioning witnesses and establishing an authoritative account of what happened.
Accountability
To identify and publish evidence showing what institutions and individuals knew, when they knew it and how warnings, risks and responsibilities were handled.
Compensation
To establish a comprehensive compensation framework for infected and affected people.
Remembrance
To ensure that those who died were remembered as individuals and that the consequences for families were recognised as part of the scandal’s history.
A document-led campaign
Factor 8’s work was grounded in primary evidence.
Hundreds of thousands of pages of government papers, pharma memos, medical records, meeting minutes, correspondence and archived material were examined and cross-referenced. Freedom of Information (FOI) requests were used to obtain records and the whereabouts of others that had not previously entered the public domain. During his time campaigning, Jason submitted more than 2,000 FOI requests relating to the infected blood scandal to government departments and public bodies.
The research also involved cataloguing government file references to establish which records should have existed, tracing gaps in the official archive and challenging departments when information was withheld.
This approach allowed individual documents to be placed within a wider chronology. Evidence that might otherwise have appeared isolated could be connected to earlier warnings, subsequent decisions and the accounts later given by public bodies.
The aim was to create a record that could withstand scrutiny, not merely to allege wrongdoing. The campaign demonstrated wrongdoing through the state’s own documents and showed contradictions in the defensive narrative which had persisted through governments of all persuasions for many years.
Using every available route
Research alone could not produce change. The campaign therefore worked across several connected routes.
Freedom of Information
Requests, internal reviews, appeals were used to challenge secrecy and bring previously withheld information into public view. Where necessary, refusals were pursued through the Information Commissioner, tribunals and the courts.
Legal action
In 2017, Jason’s personal claim concerning his father’s death developed into the Contaminated Blood Products Group Litigation, brought against the Government under the name Jason Evans & Others. Hundreds of infected and affected people joined the action.
Developing media investigations
Factor 8 did far more than supply documents or respond to stories already being pursued by journalists. Jason originated and developed many of the investigations from the underlying evidence.
The infected blood scandal is not one straightforward sequence of events, but hundreds of interconnected scandals involving different treatments, institutions, individuals and periods of time. Jason worked through large volumes of government papers, pharma memos and archived correspondence, painstakingly cross-referencing documents and matching details that had often been separated across different collections.
From that research, he identified distinct and understandable stories within the much larger scandal. He distilled complex evidence into focused narratives, prepared supporting chronologies, ghost-wrote initial drafts and pitched completed investigations to journalists and editors.
Jason then worked with journalists to develop the final story, supplied the documents needed to substantiate it and introduced them to infected people, bereaved families and other witnesses whose experiences were directly connected to the evidence. Following publication, Factor 8 worked strategically to amplify the coverage, extend its reach and use the resulting attention to generate further public and political pressure.
This approach enabled difficult and highly technical historical evidence to become accessible national news stories without losing the documentary foundations on which they were based.
While carrying out this work, Jason completed a master’s degree in Global Journalism and Public Relations at Coventry University. He graduated with Distinction in 2021 and received the Course Tutor’s Prize.
Parliament and government
Factor 8 worked with parliamentarians across political parties, submitted evidence, organised letters and petitions, met ministers and officials, and pressed successive governments to act.
The public inquiry
Once the Infected Blood Inquiry was established, Factor 8 was appointed as an organisational Core Participant and Jason was also a Core Participant as an individual, submitting many documents and proposed questions for witnesses, drawing upon years of research and engagement with infected and affected people.
These were not separate strands of work. Evidence generated journalism; journalism created political pressure; legal action tested official positions; and the Inquiry provided a forum in which allegations, documents and decisions could be examined publicly.
Securing a public inquiry
In the summer of 2017, legal action, new documentary evidence and growing media and parliamentary pressure brought renewed national attention to the scandal.
On 11 July 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that a UK-wide public inquiry would be established.
The announcement followed decades of work by infected people, bereaved families, campaign organisations and parliamentarians. Factor 8’s contribution was to bring newly assembled evidence, litigation and media attention together at a critical moment.
The campaign then argued that the Inquiry must be independent of the Department of Health and established with statutory powers. Both principles were ultimately adopted.
The campaign for compensation
Factor 8 argued that compensation planning should begin before the Infected Blood Inquiry published its final report.
The campaign developed proposals, made written submissions, brought families together and repeatedly pressed ministers to establish a framework capable of recognising the different forms of harm suffered by infected and affected people.
It called for family members to be recognised in their own right, rather than treated only as extensions of the person who had been infected.
The Government subsequently commissioned Sir Robert Francis KC to undertake an independent compensation framework study. That work contributed to the development of the compensation scheme and the establishment of the Infected Blood Compensation Authority.
Compensation cannot reverse infection, restore lost health or return those who died. Its importance lies in recognising harm, accepting responsibility and providing tangible redress after decades of refusal.
A collective breakthrough
No single person or organisation can claim ownership of the progress eventually made.
The campaign for infected blood scandal justice was built over decades by people who rose above stigma, told their stories, gave evidence, preserved documents, organised meetings, challenged ministers, instructed lawyers, supported other families and continued speaking when institutions hoped the issue would disappear.
Factor 8’s role was to add a determined, evidence-led campaign and focus to that collective effort.
Its work demonstrated what can happen when personal testimony is reinforced by documentary evidence, when records are rescued from dusty decay, painstakingly collated and cross-referenced, then distilled and professionally presented to journalists, the courts, Parliament and the public.
Jason understood that no single newspaper story, television series or documentary could expose a scandal of this scale. For almost a decade, the work continued relentlessly, on most days and often late into the night. As soon as one story was published, attention turned to the next set of documents, the next investigation and the next opportunity to create pressure. Much of it was unseen and happily uncredited: the hours spent crossing London to meet journalists, waiting in Westminster Hall to lobby MPs, following leads and preparing material that might take months or years to produce a result. Waiting passively for the next development was never Jason’s approach. Whenever progress stalled or depended upon somebody else taking action, he looked for a way to create the next development himself. The campaign did not wait for momentum; it made it.