A hospital trust has been criticised by a powerful Westminster committee for deliberately manipulating its waiting lists.

The Public Accounts Committee said Surrey and Sussex NHS Trust was among nine trusts which had undermined public confidence.

The trust is responsible for both Crawley and Horsham hospitals and East Surrey Hospital in Redhill.

The committee launched an investigation in the wake of a damning National Audit Office report on the fiddling of waiting lists last year.

The investigation suggested 6,000 patients suffered from "deliberate manipulation" of lists.

Investigations uncovered patients being left off waiting lists and inappropriate suspensions from the lists.

Patients were also offered admission dates while away on holiday and were given non-existent short notice admission dates.

The committee also attacked the way the NHS responded to the scandal.

It criticised the £95,000 pay-off given to the trust's former chief executive Isobel Gowan when she left after failing to meet waiting list targets.

This included a "gagging clause" and no "clawback" provision for getting the money back if the former chief executive landed another NHS job.

However, the MPs acknowledged the trust did later consider recovering part of the payment and got £7,500.

Concerns over the waiting list figures came to light following the departure of Mrs Gowan and the appointment of her replacement Ken Cunningham in 2000.

In 1998, the trust had bucked all expected trends by announcing the number of patients awaiting treatment had fallen.

Mr Cunningham discovered discrepancies in the figures and asked the NHS South East Regional Office to investigate.

The investigation was followed by a report by the National Audit Office which found "almost all of the reduction of 1,800 in the waiting list during 1998-9 was achieved through non-legitimate means."

It also suggested Mrs Gowan should take responsibility for the mismanagement and false reporting of waiting lists.

The inquiry reported that in 1998 about 700 patients had been deliberately held back from being put on the waiting list with only urgent patients being put in the queue.

It also found 300 patients who were due to be transferred to another hospital within the trust also failed to be put on the waiting list and hundreds of patients were taken off the list unnecessarily.

The report suggested hospital staff would contact patients awaiting treatment to find out when they were planning to go on holidays.

Those patients would then be telephoned again and deliberately offered care during that period.

Others were offered non-existent appointments at very short notice.

In each case, if patients declined the dates on offer they would be suspended from or taken off the waiting list.

The trust has now carried out a full revamp of its waiting list policy and procedures and a new management team has been set up.

It says it has put all the necessary measures in place to ensure nothing like this can ever happen again.

Conservative MP Edward Leigh, the committee chairman, said deliberate manipulation of waiting lists by the nine trusts had undermined public confidence in the NHS.

He said: "There is more and more pressure being put on officials. They are worried they are going to get their knuckles rapped and this is what happens."

The Government has introduced a new code of conduct for NHS managers in the wake of the scandals.

It forbids any manipulation of waiting lists in order to meet ambitious government targets.

Nigel Crisp, chief executive of the NHS, admitted in some cases trusts had struck compromise deals with managers found to be manipulating the lists.

But he said this had not happened in the last year and would never happen again.

He said: "In any future cases where we discover issues of this sort we will deal with them very firmly and very fast and make sure that we have safeguards in place to look after the people involved."

Ministers say that the Audit Commission will in future check figures submitted by hospital trusts.