Link: Morning press briefing from 24 February.
It was an issue which the Government took very seriously and John Reid had set out in the last six months new measures that were being taken to address the issue. The figures were for 2003 so they would not in any way reflect these new measures. The important thing about these figures was that because they had more detailed information, it allowed us to try and identify the range of measures that would help to counter it. There was no single cause of MSRA that you could just address. It confirmed what we knew, that this was a serious issue, but it also underlined the rationale for the series of measures which John Reid had introduced.
