Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many reports were submitted by members of the public through the Yellow Card scheme, in each of the past five years, in relation to the sale of (a) counterfeit medicines, (b) unapproved medicines in the UK, and (c) medicines which are authorised for supply in the UK but supplied through unregulated channels.

Answering the question raised by the Hon. Member would require the Medicines and Healthcare Products Agency staff to go through a large volume of data manually. This is because the information is not held in such a way to be able to filter by the requested categories.

The sections (a) and (b) would require a data extraction to identify all reports received from members of the public over the last five years. Following this, a manual review would need to be undertaken of every report to cross reference the suspect drug against all active licenses at the time of reporting for each individual case and would thereby incur disproportionate cost. Section (c) is information which is not held in the Yellow Card database.

The Guide to Parliamentary Work sets here out that there is an advisory cost limit known as the disproportionate cost threshold which is the level above which departments can decide not to answer a written question. The Guide to Parliamentary Work is published online and is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guide-to-parliamentary-work