Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the potential cost to the public purse of universal free prescriptions in NHS England.
The Department has made no such estimate. NHS England received £554.9 million in revenue from the National Health Service prescription charge for the financial year 2016/17. If all prescriptions had been free of charge that year, this is the revenue that would have been forgone.
Source: Department of Health Annual Report and Accounts 2016-17