Department of Health and Social Care

Sadik Al-Hassan Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sadik Al-Hassan (North Somerset) (Lab)]

I must declare an interest as a registered pharmacist for nearly two decades and an expert on pharmacy procurement.

Let be begin by saying that I welcome the UK-US pharmaceutical trade agreement, and also by saying something quite controversial: President Donald Trump is right. We do underpay for drugs—not just our expensive, lifesaving rare cancer drugs, but the everyday drugs that we purchase.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

Will the hon. Gentleman to comment on the fact that the NHS pays 10 times the manufacturing costs for over 80% of the licensed medicines that we buy? How is that underpaying?

[Sadik Al-Hassan]

I am not sure where the hon. Gentleman’s figures come from. When we look at the drug tariff reimbursement, which is the system that we use to pay, and compare it with the arrangements in other countries, it is clear that we underpay significantly. Perhaps he is referring to something of which I am unaware; I should be happy to chat to him outside.

We in this country are addicted to low-cost drugs for our health service, and what does that addiction mean? It means that we have the lowest costs and we always go for the cheapest drugs, and that favours foreign manufacturers. It destroys UK supply chains, as we have seen over the last 25 years, and it endangers our resilience as a country. We are already seeing the side effects of that, with drugs being out of stock. We have a system for payment called the drug tariff, which establishes how much pharmacies will buy drugs for and how much they will be reimbursed for. There are currently 254 price concessions. Price concessions happen when a drug is out of stock, and we must make an emergency increase to the price in the drug tariff to try to bring it back into the country. Given that there are 3,500 drugs in that section of the drug tariff, 254 does not sound a lot, but it is the highest level that I remember seeing in my entire professional career. Last month’s highest level of 230 has just been exceeded.

Cheap drugs often mean that we overvalue the benefit of medicines in our system and use a “drug first” approach in the NHS, and that has continued for decades. When we increase the price that we pay for drugs, it allows us to start considering the benefits of other types of treatment, such as social prescribing. Social prescribing becomes a great deal cheaper by comparison in a system in which drugs are valued at the correct level. The all-party parliamentary group on pharmacy, which I chair, published a report in June 2025 that laid out some of the problems with drug pricing and availability. I absolutely support the idea of paying more for drugs, because at the moment we are building a system that is creaking and breaking. By trying to pursue every penny of savings, we have destroyed UK manufacturing and offshored our problems. The only way to bring that back is to rebuild the drug tariff, with the idea of paying to procure more in the UK.

[Layla Moran]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his speech, because he is showing how important this debate is. A lot of this has not been flushed out. Medicines UK, which is responsible for a lot of the generics that he talks about, disagrees with him, but that is a conversation for another time. My question is specific: does he agree that the lack of transparency behind this deal, and the lack of an impact assessment, is a material issue and that we should ask the Government to release such information?

[Sadik Al-Hassan]

First of all, Medicines UK does not disagree with me; its members disagree that the value from the UK-US trade deal will go to people other than them. Medicines UK actually thinks that companies are not paid enough for drugs in this country. Unfortunately, you might need to go and have a chat with the association about that, because you might have misunderstood.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. You mean “the hon. Member”, not “you”—I do not need to go anywhere. I ask the hon. Member please to wrap up as soon as he can, because we have many speeches to get in.

[Sadik Al-Hassan]

In conclusion, I welcome the deal. I hope we find a way to pay for drugs correctly in this country, so that we value them properly and can value the rest of the system.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I will give Front Benchers a heads-up: we are not going to have a huge amount of time, so please edit your speeches accordingly.