Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the Answer of 11 January 1988 to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, Official Report, column 184W, on contaminated blood products, if he will place a copy of the letter sent to that right hon. Member in the Library.

We regret that we are unable to locate a copy of a letter from Tony Newton, the then Minister of State for Health, to the Rt. hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field MP).

We have published all available material before 1992 and have acknowledged that unfortunately some papers from the period were inadvertently lost or destroyed a number of years ago. This is covered in some detail in Lord Archer’s report and it is important to note that Lord Archer also made clear that his inquiry “discovered no evidence of malicious destruction of relevant records”.

Officials have not been able to identify any of the correspondence referred to or the information it would have contained. However haemophilia centres were alert to the potential of HIV in blood products by 1983.