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Four years ago, ministers gave the go-ahead to a scheme whose scope was breathtakingly ambitious. They wanted to transform the NHS into a hi-tech, computerised service, connecting more than 30,000 GPs to nearly 300 hospitals. A key part of it was the plan to put the medical records of 50 million patients on a single database.

But what is the biggest civilian computer project in the world has been hampered by a series of setbacks. Ministers admitted over the summer that the project was two years behind schedule; a major supplier, Accenture, pulled out of two contracts worth ?2bn; and iSoft, the software company at the heart of the project, is being investigated by the Financial Services Authority over irregularities in its accounts.