By Emily McGarvey & Charley Adams
BBC News
Image source, Getty Photos
Image caption, The freeze in costs will assist ease likely the most price of residing pressures, says Health Secretary Sajid Javid
NHS prescription costs in England are to be frozen for the first time in 12 years, the federal government has confirmed.
Single prescription costs, which the Department of Health said would robotically rise “primarily based on inflation”, will remain at £9.35 till next year.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid said freezing the costs would “put money reduction in of us’s pockets”.
Campaigners welcomed the transfer but identified that 90% of prescriptions disbursed are already freed from cost.
Folks eligible for free of fee prescriptions encompass those on negate advantages, pregnant girls folk and recent mothers, of us with specified scientific circumstances or disabilities, the over-60s and below-16s.
Prescriptions are free for all people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The fee of a single prescription in England has risen from £7.65 in 2012-13 to £9.35 in 2021-22, at the side of an expand of 20p from 2020-21.
Nonetheless, the federal government had indicated in March that prescription costs in England, that are reviewed each and every year, wouldn’t be elevated this year and Sunday’s announcement confirms that transfer.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said the freeze supposed prescription costs wouldn’t expand till no longer no longer up to April 2023 and would build sufferers who pay prescription costs in England £17m.
The freeze additionally applies to the £30.25 for a three month prescription prepayment certificate (PPC), and the 12-month cost, which is able to be paid in instalments, will stop at £108.10.
“The rise within the price of residing has been unavoidable as we face global challenges and the repercussions of Putin’s unlawful battle in Ukraine,” Mr Javid said.
“Whereas we won’t fully prevent these rises, where we can assist – we fully will.”
Image source, Getty Photos
Image caption, The freeze system prescription costs is potentially no longer rising till no longer no longer up to April 2023
The announcement comes after Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked ministers to reach reduction up with measures to ease the stress on household budgets.
Nonetheless, Faith Angwet, a single mom of two, said she had to seize between paying for prescriptions to treat for her hypertension, or utilizing that money to feed her youngsters.
She said the price freeze “may perhaps perhaps no longer scurry a long way” because “or no longer it’s no longer essentially the outgoings affecting me, every little thing is going up in mark and I’m no longer in a position to come up with the money for every little thing I utilize to be, at the side of my prescription”.
And Claire Anderson, of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, said folk who enact no longer qualify for free of fee prescriptions as a consequence of their profits, age, or treatment kind, in most cases had to gain choices about which medicines they want.
“Those medicines are prescribed for a reason because that patient wants that medications,” she urged the BBC.
And Laura Cockram, chairwoman of the Prescription Costs Coalition, who welcomed the freeze, said the federal government may perhaps just restful evaluate the checklist of folk who licensed for free of fee prescriptions.
She said the prescription exemption cost checklist used to be put collectively higher than 50 years within the past, when circumstances like HIV “did no longer even exist” and at a time there “weren’t life saving treatments for things like asthma, Parkinson’s and MS”.
The federal government these days proposed rising the age for free of fee prescriptions from 60 to be primarily based on the stage pension age – 66 for males and girls folk – but the DHSC said no choices own been made on this.
GP Dr Sarah Jarvis said this could gain the cost residing disaster more noteworthy for older of us, who the “overwhelming majority” of medicines are prescribed to, because “they’re the ones who’re presumably to own a lot of scientific circumstances”.