Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the cost of his Department's recent consultation on infected blood was; how many responses that consultation received from (a) people with Stage 1 hepatitis C, (b) people with Stage 2 hepatitis C, (c) people with HIV, (d) people with HIV and hepatitis C, (e) the widows and widowers of those affected and (f) other people; and how many full-time equivalent staff have been allocated to running that consultation.

The main costs associated with the consultation on reform of the infected blood payment schemes were for printing of the consultation document and postage of letters to inform all 3,482 scheme registrants, and 180 hon. Members, of the launch of the consultation. This amounted to £7,177 and was taken from the Department’s own budgets. A core team of three civil servants, with senior management input, is developing the new payment scheme and the consultation is integral to their work. Thirteen additional staff members, from across the Department, are helping to analyse the consultation responses.

Information on the respondents’ status was collected as part of the consultation but it was not obligatory to provide it and neither was it collected in the way asked in this question.

Consultation responses are still being analysed, however to date, the number of respondents by category are;