Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Health – in the House of Commons at 11:30 am on 22 February 2005.
I will not confirm that it goes back to the Coughlan judgment. It goes back to when the previous Government ordered 96 health authorities to write separate sets of eligibility criteria. The right hon. Gentleman ought to know that; I rather suspect that he was Secretary of State at the time when it was ordered. The fact is that the ombudsman asked us to go back in our review to 1996 precisely because the confusion arose from the point at which the criteria were issued. We are cleaning up the Conservative party's mess, and we are doing so at great expense to the taxpayer.