when he was appointed Health minister, although he did not become a member of the Cabinet until 1962. During a meeting with parents of babies that had been born with deformities caused by the drug thalidomide, he was unsympathetic to the victims, refusing to meet any babies affected by the drug. Powell also refused to launch a public inquiry, and resisted calls to issue a warning against any left-over thalidomide pills that might remain in people's medicine cabinets (as US President John F. Kennedy had done). On December 4, 1961, Powell, as Minister of Health, announced that the birth control pill Conovid could be prescribed to women through the NHS at a subsidised price of 2 shillings per month. In this job, he developed the 1962 Hospital Plan. He began a debate on the neglect of the huge psychiatric institutions, calling for them to be replaced by wards in general hospitals. In his 1961 "Water Tower" speech, he said: The speech catalysed a debate that was one of several strands leading to the Care in the Community initiative of the 1980s. In 1993, however, Powell stated that his policy could have worked. He said the criminally insane should have never been released and that the problem was one of funding. He said the new way of caring for the mentally ill would cost more, not less, than the old way because community care was decentralised and intimate as well as being "more human". His successors had not, Powell claimed, provided the money for local authorities to spend on mental health care and therefore institutional care had been neglected while at the same time there was not any investment in community care. After his speech on immigration in 1968, Powell's political opponents sometimes alleged that he had, when Minister of Health, recruited immigrants from the Commonwealth into the National Health Service (NHS). However, the Minister of Health was not responsible for recruitment (this was left to health authorities) and Sir George Godber, Chief Medical Officer for Her Majesty's Government in England from 1960 to 1973, stated that the allegation was "bunk ... absolute rubbish. There was no such policy". Powell's biographer Simon Heffer also stated that the claim "is a complete untruth. As Powell's biographer I have been thoroughly through the Ministry of Health papers at the Public Record Office and have found no evidence to support this assertion". During the