Conservative Party leader David Cameron has attacked the government over its handling of the £12.4bn NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), claiming that ministers had “fallen for the sales patter” of IT suppliers and consultants.

“Spend a few million on these consultants, they're told, a few billion on this computer project, and everything will be ok. Well it isn't.”

“Today Google has three million medical articles online, there for public viewing and easy searching... It's this horizontal diffusion of knowledge that makes me so confident we can do better than the government's proposal for a vast, centralised, NHS database,” he said.