Clause 31 - Power to charge
Health Bill
4:00 pm
Steve Webb (Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Health; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
We are powering ahead, which is great, and we come now to part 4, which deals with pharmaceutical services. The clause relates to the power for charges to be levied in respect of a chemist’s application to a pharmaceutical list. I hope that at some point we discuss the broader issues of entry and control of entry in respect of pharmaceutical supply. A number of us are concerned about the position of community pharmacies and the small local pharmacist as distinct from a pharmacist in a supermarket or something similar. I hope that we will discuss some of those issues in due course, but amendment No. 121 is much more specific. It would replace lines 20 to 40 on page 26 of the Bill, which contain provisions on the power to charge relating to England. The amendment is essentially a reformulation of those provisions.
Subsection (2) of the amendment would ensure that when the Secretary of State determines what fee can be charged, variation of the charge for any given type of application in different parts of England will be precluded, although there could be variation according to the nature of the application. This is an England-only clause, and we are trying to get consistency in the charges that might be levied, rather than allow charges that might vary according to primary care trust.
Beyond that, many of the reformulations in our amendment are similar to the original clause. For example, subsection (3) of the amendment is about consultation, and consultation provisions are in the original clause. The amendment would not much change the spirit of what is already in the Bill, but it would avoid some unnecessary variation in fees across the country. We think that it would tidy things up a bit, although that might be going a bit far. That is the spirit behind the amendment.