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The minutes of a meeting of the UK Health Departments recorded the desire of the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland Health Departments to work towards a UK-wide approach.

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Jeremy Hunt wrote to David Cameron suggesting that it was "basically impossible" to bridge the gap between the expectations of families who had suffered "and what we can realistically afford" but that time was pressing due to litigation from Hepatitis C sufferers and he put forward three potential options.

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In his letter to David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt gave a third option of finding an additional £100m from the Department of Health funds which would be used to fund accelerated access to new Hepatitis C treatments for those in the early stage of the disease.

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David Cameron rejected his senior policy adviser's recommendation of proceeding with Option 1 put forward by Jeremy Hunt and rejected a proposal to withdraw support from uninfected family members.

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In November 2015 it was decided that a further £25m per year would be allocated from Department of Health central funds to the financial support schemes over the following five years.

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Jeremy Hunt suggested that "Whilst parity between the devolved schemes would have been desirable, Health functions were devolved and each Administration had constitutional responsibility for its own scheme."

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In August 2015, two different payment options were identified. Firstly, to reform the current schemes to a non-charitable scheme. Secondly, to reform all schemes into one with an additional £25 million.

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Along with the publication of a consultation document on payments scheme, the Department of Health announced that they had identified up to an additional further £100 million from its budget for the proposals in the consultation.

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Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales were not given the opportunity to review the Department of Health consultation paper on payment schemes before they were released.

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Advance notice of the Department of Health's consultation on payment schemes was not provided to Northern Ireland.

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The report, "HCV Contaminated Blood Scoping Exercise" aimed to assist the Scottish Government in understanding more clearly the scope and scale of the unmet needs resulting from Hepatitis C infection and to detail the support required by those affected.

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The Expert Group on Financial and Other Support made a number of recommendations in its report (Ross Report).

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The Scottish Government faced challenges when seeking changes in levels of assistance from the AHOs, as any change required all four nations to agree and to identify additional funding.

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SIBSS was established, to be administered by the Common Services Agency for the Scottish Health Service, and began operations on 1 April 2017.

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The AHO's system was intended to make ex-gratia payments, but were not intended to be compensatory.

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Samantha Baker (the team leader with overall responsibility for infected blood within the Scottish Government's Health Protection Division) told the Inquiry that parity had not been a prominent part of the regular four nations' meetings until 2019.

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Martin Bell, director of NHS Scotland, was against introducing additional bureaucracy which might potentially slow anything down.

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Samantha Baker agreed in her oral evidence to the Inquiry that by mid 2020 there had not been much progress over the previous year: "the UK Government hadn't been able to secure any additional funding so that there was a lack of progress as a result of that and things weren't progressing as quickly as we'd expected" [regarding the payment schemes].

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By the end of 2020 there had been no significant progress or developments regarding the achievement of parity.

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In Scotland, in March 2021, there was a move towards greater parity.

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