Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many FP57 forms were processed by the NHS Business Services Authority in 2017 for people seeking a refund for prescription charges; and what the average cost of processing a FP57 form and returning the prescription charge to the applicant was in 2017.

The number of FP57 forms processed by the NHS Business Services Authority in 2017 for people seeking a refund for prescription charges cannot be provided as this information is not available. We can verify that a total of 9,819 refund applications for prescription charges were processed in England during the period of 1 January 2017 and 30 November 2017. Prescription refund applications may contain one or more FP57 forms. Applications received during December 2017 are still being processed and the data for this month is not yet available.

The average cost of processing a FP57 form and returning the prescription charge to the applicant in 2017 cannot be provided as this information is not available.