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Patients would be able to book appointments with GPs on their home computer and once in the surgery would choose their preferred hospital for an operation.

Hospital staff would have instant access to electronic records of any accident victim and x-rays would be electronically transferred from one end of the country to the other.

The scheme’s ambition and potential cost were staggering. Yet Blair gave it the go-ahead without public consultation. The government initially allocated £2.3 billion for the project and boldly proclaimed that electronic records for every patient in the country would be online by the end of last year. The costs and the delays have been mounting ever since.

It is an example, say critics, of how the management consultants contracted to deliver such systems are only too happy to think big since it makes more lucrative work for themselves.

The man tasked with running the CfH project is Richard Granger, a Bristol University graduate and management consultant. A driven, abrasive character, he bought a Porsche as soon as he started earning “serious money”, lives in a large country house in Cumbria and was appointed on a salary of £250,000, making him one of the country’s highest-paid civil servants.

Few dispute the need to make improvements — but critics say that a centralised system will require vast computing power, raises questions of security and will be a nightmare if it goes wrong.

“In the system they are building, errors can get spread and copied across the network and nobody can do anything about it,” said Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University and one of the 23 academics calling for an independent review of the project. “What they are proposing is a recipe for chaos and disaster.”

Helen Wilkinson-Makey, a 40-year-old manager from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, says that her experiences highlight the pitfalls. She discovered that an inputting error had led to her being wrongly logged as having received treatment at an alcohol dependency unit in 1998. The computerised record had been distributed to her strategic health authority, primary care trust and a local “shared care agency”.

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“I only found out about it by chance and I was incredibly angry,” she said. Numerous attempts to correct the records have proved futile — and she fears that patient confidentiality is compromised.

“The only way you can stop data being given out to third parties is by opting out of NHS care altogether, and that is what I have done, but they still have not destroyed the record,” she said. “I find it very worrying indeed and I think people should know about this.”

Doctors have similar concerns — and if they refuse to put patient records on the database it will undermine the whole purpose of the system. Many doctors are also doubtful about the “choose and book” system for making hospital appointments, complaining that it is unreliable.

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