Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of making savings in the pharmaceutical supply chain instead of reducing funding to community pharmacies.

The Department introduced the Health Service Supplies (Costs) Bill on 15 September. This Bill is intended to enable my Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State to make regulations to obtain information from across the supply chain to assure itself that all parts of the supply chain provides value for money to the National Health Service and the taxpayer. We expect everyone in the NHS and the supply chain should play its part in achieving efficiency savings.