HEALTH chiefs have made an astonishing U-turn by promising young Hampshire seven-year-old Justin Gregory high-quality artificial limbs for life.

The pledge comes from managers at Portsmouth disablement service centre, where the boy's Southampton family had given up hope that they would find false legs good enough to let him play football.

His mother, Jeanette, has welcomed the announcement but says all children must now receive the best treatment available on the NHS.

Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the unit, is to pay for the more expensive limbs that Justin is receiving privately following a successful Daily Echo fundraising campaign in March.

It denies it has changed its policy and says the boy would have been given the hi-tech knee and leg had he remained with the NHS.

The move comes as the Echo's Make a Difference campaign to give young amputees the chance of normal lives received a huge boost from the government.

Health minister John Hutton has promised to make a sweeping review of the artificial limb service following a meeting with three cross-party Hampshire MPs who back our campaign.

Mrs Gregory, of Cumbrian Way, Millbrook, said: "It is very strange that before we went private the Portsmouth centre insisted that Justin had to have a leg held on by a waistband.

"They would not give him the knee he now has that enables him to run about and play football but now the management are making the money available for just that.

"We will give them the chance to see if they can do what Dorset Orthopaedic Clinic has done.

"If they will do this for my son then they must do it for all children."

Mrs Gregory said she offered to pay extra for the life-like covering but that she was told the NHS would pay for everything.

"It took us going private and to the Echo to make them realise that it does matter to children what limbs look like and what activity they can do on them."

A spokeswoman for the trust said the new limb was slightly more expensive.

She added: "When the original limb was prescribed, the knee he now has was new on the market and was not a system the department was familiar with, so the waistband was used.

"The bones in Justin's knee were not formed enough to have the knee fitted but he is now fully developed and he can have this leg.

"If he had come back for evaluation after a year, we would have prescribed the knee he has and that is what we are now doing."

Converted for the new archive on 25 January 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.