They were in fact destroyed over a period from July 1994 to March 1998. The audit review concluded that there was either a delegation of responsibility without proper instructions, or an assumption of responsibility by someone who had not been authorised. The files should have been recalled when it was known that they might be relevant to the litigation. It was also judged that the periods assigned for review were shorter than should have been assigned.

It is not surprising that some of those who gave evidence to us suspected that there was an exercise in suppressing evidence of negligence or misconduct. We have not been able to interview any of those responsible, and even had we done so, recollections may have been eroded by the passage of time, but we have discovered no evidence of malicious destruction of relevant records. Comment on the standard of record keeping at the period in question is not within our Terms of Reference. But had an official Public Inquiry been established while recollections were fresh, the suspicions might have been addressed.

After Burning the Transfusion Record, Ministerial Records and Misplacing Key Files the Department rushed to settle out of court with the known infected groups and knowingly forced people already infected to sign waivers before accessing their HCV status. Hardly an action that intends to truthfully discover the 20,000 annually HCV infected or the 100,000’s of surviving NHS HCV victims.

It has since proceeded to pretend vast numbers of HCV infections are “not there” and fail utterly to act on the need to follow every WHO hepatitis c look back testing directive. Even diagnosed non a and non b hepatitis patients from the early Eighties backwards have never been comprehensively searched for and cared for.

A number of witnesses have expressed resentment that recipients of payments to address the consequences of HIV should have been required to renounce any right of action in respect of Hepatitis C, although it was known to the Department that they were at least potentially at risk of having been infected with the Hepatitis C virus. 

It is hardly surprising that, since there had been litigation, entailing mutual disclosure of documents, there are suspicions that the authorities may have been aware that some patients had been tested for Hepatitis C, with positive results, of which they had not been informed by their doctors. Mr Haydn Lewis commented: 

“I found it pretty disgraceful to ask them (the patients) to sign a waiver to disregard any future responsibility when at that time they actually knew that I was infected with it”. He was not then himself aware of the test.