Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the impact of the rising cost of medicines on community pharmacy contractors’ ability to deliver local pharmaceutical services.

The Government commits £2.592 billion per year to community pharmacy. This is made up of £1.792 billion in fees and allowances and £800 million from medicine margin. Medicine margin is the difference between what a pharmacy contractor pays for a medicine and what they are reimbursed by the National Health Service when they dispense the product.

The Department assesses the overall medicine margin across all products through a quarterly medicine margin survey. This data is used to calculate the average amount of medicine margin retained by pharmacy contractors during the year and to adjust reimbursement prices to ensure that the £800 million medicines margin is delivered to pharmacy contactors. This ensures that higher or lower prices of medicines do not impact on community pharmacy contractors’ overall level of funding and therefore their ability to deliver pharmaceutical services.

Additionally, a one-off investment in the sector of £100 million across 2022/23 and 2023/24 was announced in September last year.