Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the proportion of his Department's documents relating to the issue of contaminated blood products for haemophiliacs between 1970 and 1985 which have been destroyed.

All papers that are available for the period 1970-85, amounting to over 5,500 documents, have been published on the Department’s website. Papers from more than 30 years ago are already a matter of public record. In addition over 200 files of documents covering the period from 1986 to 1995 are available to the public through the National Archive.

In 2006 the Department commissioned a review of all the documents held between 1970-85 relating to blood safety. The review, titled: ‘Review of documentation relating to the safety of blood products 1970-1985’ was published in May 2007 and can be found at:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130107105354/http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_074950

Lord Archer’s report following his independent Inquiry covered the inadvertent destruction of documents and made clear he “discovered no evidence of malicious destruction of relevant records”.