When this newspaper led the campaign for justice for the victims of thalidomide in the 1970s, you might have thought it had won the battle. Distillers, which distributed the German treatment for morning sickness in Britain, paid £20m into a trust to meet the future needs of the victims.

Many thalidomiders did not survive their first year of life. Those who did typically suffered severe physical deformities and in some cases brain damage. A dangerous drug that should never have been licensed for use wrecked tens of thousands of lives around the world and many hundreds in Britain.

The battle was not won in 1973, however, when Distillers agreed to pay compensation (but only after trying every legal trick to block our investigation). So in recent months The Sunday Times has again been campaigning on behalf of the thalidomide victims and the neglect of their plight. While Distillers, now part of Diageo, paid up, the government has yet to accept its responsibility.

As Sir Harold Evans, this newspaper’s editor in the 1970s, put it recently: “This was a government responsibility. This was a drug disaster fathered by a lackadaisical drug regulatory system. It didn’t happen in the US because they had a better regulatory system.”

In Britain a government agency, the Cohen committee (the standing joint committee on the classification of proprietary medicines), placed the drug into a category designated “new remedies of proved value” in 1958, so encouraging National Health Service doctors to prescribe it. That decision, which also exempted the drug from tax, was taken despite the committee having failed to request detailed information from the manufacturer or to conduct its own tests.

The government appears ready to accept its responsibilities at last. Ministers are proposing a settlement worth several million pounds to compensate the remaining thalidomide victims in Britain, who number about 460. Additional funds will be administered through the Thalidomide Trust. There is a prospect, too, of an official acknowledgment or apology for the failure to protect the unborn children of mothers who took the drug in good faith.

Words, of course, are cheap. What will concern the thalidomiders is whether the additional money is genuinely new and not merely diverted from other budgets. What will concern them most, as they head towards old age, is whether it will be enough.

Those questions are yet to be resolved, although they should be in the coming weeks. Thalidomide victims are right to look with care at the offer the government intends to make. They have waited far too long already.