Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate his Department has made of the amount of expenditure on prescribed medication which is then unused in each of the last five years.

Information is not collected centrally on the annual cost or amount of dispensed but unused prescription medicines in the National Health Service.

Research commissioned by the Department to determine the scale, causes and costs of waste medicines in England and published in November 2010 found that the gross cost of unused prescription medicines in primary and community care in the NHS in England in 2009 was £300 million a year and that up to £150 million of this was avoidable.

It also found that the NHS was managing the problem of medicines wastage more robustly than ever before, wastage of medicines was not a systemic problem in the NHS and was no worse than other comparable countries.