National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill

Debate between Lord Scriven and Baroness Lawlor

Committee stage
Tuesday 4th February 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendment on pharmacies. We must think of the impact. I have spoken to those who have been impacted already and worry that there is an impact not just on community pharmacies, which employ more pharmacists, but on small providers. When we look at what happens in towns and villages across the country, we see that, when a pharmacy closes down, elderly people, families and people looking for their prescriptions have to take a bus and go somewhere else. The impact on town centres of this sort of change can be quite significant. We have 3,560 independent pharmacies today.

In all of our debates today, we have spoken about the impact on each sector and how it might be alleviated, with amendment after amendment proposed from these Benches and from the Liberal Democrats, who spoke earlier in Committee. Barring retail and hospitality, today’s groups of amendments cover what are usually called public services. They are provided by independent providers. Some, such as the early years and hospice sectors, are charitable as well as independent. If they do not provide these services, there will be greater costs to the taxpayer, and they will do so in a much more bureaucratic and less person-sensitive way. The quality will go down and the cover will be broader; in fact, it will not meet the kind of person-to-person approach that we see offered by many independent providers.

I support my noble friend Lord Jackson because we are talking about people and their jobs: 80,000 pharmacists were employed in 2023-24. As well as them, we are thinking of pharmaceutical technicians, of which there are 34,300. These are real people and real jobs, and they are on top of the jobs that we have spoken about day in and day out in this Committee. I implore the Government and the Minister to think about what happens when people’s jobs go: not only do we as communities lose the services that are vital and which we have spoken about; we see an impact on our streets and our communities, and we increase the cost to the taxpayer—that will go further, in addition to the high hike in borrowing and the tax rises that the Government intend. We will see the further damage that will be caused to the economy. I implore the Government to think again.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to the amendments in this group; I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, for introducing it. I draw the Committee’s attention to the fact that I am the vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Pharmacy, so this issue is close to my heart.

The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, aptly outlined the pressure that community pharmacists are under at the moment and the issues that they face. He also mentioned a lot of facts and figures from Community Pharmacy England and the National Pharmacy Association, which have outlined the impact that these national insurance contributions will have on community pharmacy. The reason an impact assessment will not work is that the data is already out there, in terms of data from the industry itself. On average, every week, 10 community pharmacists are closing. There is a crisis in community pharmacy, which means that pharmacy after pharmacy in communities up and down this country can no longer survive and is falling by the wayside. An impact assessment would be useful only to reiterate the information that is already out there from the industry; it will not stop organisations falling by the wayside every single week.