This week I spoke in a Westminster Hall debate on the Government's response to the Covid-19 Inquiry's Module 4 report, which relates to vaccines and therapeutics.

I focussed on the compensation available to those who have been injured by Covid vaccination, as I have in previous occasions. If we expect people to take vaccines in future emergencies, we must protect the very small number of those harmed by them.

Failing to do so risks undermining trust in the very system we may need to rely on again.

The argument I made is not about the wisdom of mass vaccination. Remarkably, many of those who were injured, or who lost loved ones, still support the idea.

What they say, and what we should all agree with, is that people who did what the government asked of them deserve to be properly compensated for the harm they suffered. At the moment, people in that position rely on support from the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme which was designed and first implemented in the late 1970s.

My constituent Kate Scott, who has been campaigning relentlessly for her husband Jamie who was badly injured by his Covid vaccination and for others in a similar position has maintained throughout that the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme has two fundamental problems.

The first is the amount available, which has not kept pace even with inflation and is paid on an all-or-nothing basis.

The second is the requirement to show 60 per cent disablement before a claim can succeed. Nobody ever claimed that the scheme was designed to be the only route to compensation, but it is extremely difficult to obtain redress any other way, including through the courts.

There is also the matter of what the scheme costs to run.

About £32 million has been paid out in compensation, yet in the last four years the bureaucracy surrounding it has cost around £82 million.

It is hard to defend a system that spends far more on administering support than on delivering it.

Reforming it is therefore about two things: fairness to the individuals affected and the effectiveness of Government policy. It would be brave to claim that a pandemic on this scale will never happen again.

If it does, we will once again depend on the British public to (literally) roll up their sleeves to be vaccinated for the protection of themselves and others, and their confidence in any future vaccination programme will rest on whether they believe those injured in the last one were treated fairly.

So far, they have not been.

This cannot wait. Baroness Hallett's Covid-19 Inquiry said the 60% threshold should be reformed "as a matter of urgency".

The Government accepts there is a "need for reform" and are "committed to reviewing the scheme", which I welcome, but they say they will provide "further details in due course".

Those of us who have served in government know that is not the language of urgency. The injured and the bereaved expect a fair response, and they expect it soon.

If the Government want to be confident of the effectiveness of a future pandemic response, they must first deal properly with the fall-out of the last one.