Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much freight capacity is used to transport medicines that have been imported to the UK from (a) other EU and EEA countries and (b) the rest of the world.

The Department does not hold information on the current level of air freight capacity used to import medicines into the United Kingdom or the number of medicines that reach the UK via different routes. We did, however, write to a number of pharmaceutical companies to understand more about their supply chains to allow the Government to effectively plan for a number of different European Union exit scenarios.

The Department recognises that through its medicines supply contingency programme for the UK possibly leaving the EU without a deal it is requesting sensitive commercial information from pharmaceutical companies. To reassure participating companies, we have committed to treating all information received confidentially, securely and to using it only for the purposes of the Department’s programme. That means not introducing information about a company or a specific medicine into the public domain.