Oral Answers to Questions

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dunne]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising some of the issues at the Pennine trust. We are well aware that it needs improvement, which is why we have buddied it up with the outstanding Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust next door. The Salford trust is led by Sir David Dalton and the Secretary of State referred to it earlier. I will take up the matter raised by the hon. Lady directly with Sir David.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

7. What steps his Department is taking to work with community pharmacies to reduce (a) waste and (b) the cost of medicines.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (David Mowat)]

NHS England has a range of initiatives for waste and medicine cost reduction. We estimate that there is a prize of up £150 million a year to be realised across the system on waste. Community pharmacies have a significant role to play in that, partly through their existing duty to review prescriptions when repeat dispensing and partly through the separately commissioned medicine use reviews.

[Lyn Brown]

The Minister is absolutely right to say that community pharmacies have an important role to play. On 17 October, he told the House:

“We do not believe that any community pharmacies will necessarily close as a result of these cuts.”—[Official Report, 17 October 2016; Vol. 615, c. 597.]

However, the impact assessment published by his Department just two days later described a possible scenario in which 1,000 pharmacies close. Will the Minister confirm that nobody in Britain will have to travel further to get to a chemist as a result of his cuts?

[David Mowat]

The impact assessment set out an upper range, which we do not believe represents an accurate reflection of what will happen. The facts of the matter are that we need our community pharmacy network to move towards services and away from dispensing. Paying every community pharmacy in the country, or 91% of them, £25,000 just for having an establishment does not achieve—[Interruption.]