SCOTTISH Cabinet ministers were told that the Department of Health in Westminster was investigating a claim of knowingly supplying contaminated blood, newly released official files from 2003 show.

Scotland’s then health minister Malcolm Chisholm had also told the Cabinet of the Scottish Executive that he only had money for the cheapest of the options on the table to compensate those given contaminated blood north of the border.

Thousands of people across Britain in the 1970s and ’80s were given blood products infected with hepatitis viruses and HIV.

It is estimated more than 25,000 people could have been affected, the first British-wide inquiry into the public health disaster heard last year.

The British government imported blood clotting factor from the United States, where most came from donors such as prison inmates who sold infected blood, which was given to haemophiliacs and other patients.

That paper states in relation to the claim that the government knowingly supplied contaminated blood after procedures were introduced in 1991 to test for the virus used in blood transfusions: “This would be a very serious matter, if true, and the Health Department was investigating the basis of the claim.”

Earlier in 2003, in a briefing paper to the Scottish Cabinet, Mr Chisholm said he could only release up to £10 million from the health budget towards a compensation scheme.

He told the Cabinet the cheapest option was the only “financially affordable” one.

Scotland was the first part of the UK to hold an inquiry into the infected blood scandal but this did not take place until 2009 and did not report until 2015.

It estimated around 3,000 people had been infected in Scotland.

Earlier this year, the Scottish government announced increased compensation for those who contracted chronic hepatitis through contaminated blood, including to the partners of those who died.