Sir Robert Buckland has called on the Conservative government to ensure that the recommendations of an official report into the infected blood scandal are put into action “as swiftly as possible”.

A report into the scandal which saw 30,000  people treated with blood contaminated with HIV or hepatitis, and which saw 3,000 people die after such treatment, was published this week after a five-year-long inquiry lead by Sir Brian Langstaff.

It said the tragedy was ‘largely unavoidable’ and was very critical of governments, of varying political persuasions, from the 1970s up to the present. It said patients were lied to about the risks and they did not receive news of their infections soon enough.

Mr Langstaff said: “The NHS and successive governments compounded the agony by refusing to accept that wrong had been done.”

After the MP for Salisbury and cabinet office Minister John Glen told the House of Commons that billions of pounds would be made available in c0ompesnsation, with victims receiving £210,000 as a payment within 90 days, his party colleague South Swindon MP Sir Robert Buckland said the report’s recommendations should be acted on without delay.

The former Justice Secretary said: “It’s striking, isn’t it, that the chair of the inquiry Sir Brian Langstaff has said that his job isn’t yet done and that he will only regard his terms of reference as fulfilled when the government responds within a period of 12 months on his recommendations, and, importantly, he will only regard his job done if he feels that there is nothing more he can do in order to prevent delay.

“Can the minister assure me and this House, and indeed the wider public, that he and the government will do everything they can to ensure that Sir Brian’s role is fulfilled as swiftly as possible?”

Mr Glen said: “Absolutely, I can reassure him of that.

“Today’s announcements on compensation and the documents that will flow through will be a substantive response to meet the expectations of many in the communities, and the formalisation of those responses will be something that I will consider very carefully to bring clarity to the matter.”

There have been calls for Ken Clarke, now Baron Clarke of Nottingham, who was Health Secretary in the 1980s to be stripped of his peerage.

He was severely criticised in the Langstaff report for ‘indefensible’ actions, especially in suggesting there was no “conclusive proof” that HIV could be transmitted in blood products in 1983.