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Film-maker and novelist Rebecca Frayn, now 49, of west London, and husband Andy Harries, a TV executive and producer, spent about £6,000 of their savings on one course of IVF to conceive daughter, Emmy, now 10. They had tried to conceive naturally for three years

“I have identical twin boys [Jack and Finn, now 18] conceived naturally. When we wanted a third child we discovered my husband had a low sperm count so IVF was the only way we were going to conceive.

“We went privately because I was in my mid-thirties and I didn’t want to be put on a waiting list. I knew time was important.

“To be honest, it’s hard to know whether you can afford it because you have no idea how many treatments you might be facing. We could afford a first treatment and then we were going to have to have a long talk and decide, if it hadn’t worked, whether we could have afforded to try again.

“I had one treatment and that was successful. They put you through one cycle where they close down your system; it must have been about two months of drugs. And then they put you on drugs to massively stimulate the ovaries.

“I thought it was so gruelling and harrowing that it inspired me to write a novel, which I published a few years later, called One Life. Although I was very lucky and had two children; although I was very lucky to conceive in that first cycle, the idea that some people are locked in that cycle of hell over and over again blew my mind. I thought it was a truly, uniquely ghastly and horrible experience.

“The costs pile up. I think you are given an initial cost and then they keep adding a new stage and that seems to have a new cost. I don’t think we fully understood what we let ourselves in for when we embarked on it.

“The costs seemed to my husband and I – as a couple who paid out – to be astonishingly high and if Robert Winston, who knows the system from the inside, is confirming that they don’t need to be that high, that is a grave concern. Having said that, as a couple who were very, very fortunate and conceived a beautiful, intelligent, athletic daughter, the other side of the argument is that it is a priceless gift.

“There is no sum of money that I could have put on the joy and good fortune of having conceived her.”