A controversial scheme to share the health records of everyone in the country has been quietly scrapped by the government on the same day as the Chilcot report was published.

Under the care.data scheme, the medical notes of everyone in the NHS were to be pooled in a vast central database which could be accessed by doctors, researchers and pharmaceutical companies.

Medical experts and charities backed the database claiming it would help them understand the causes of disease, spot side effects to new drugs and detect outbreaks of infectious diseases.