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 robustness of the vertically integrated community pharmacy network and the medicines distributions chain and the effect on patients of the failure of one part of that network.

No such assessment has been made. A failure in the distribution network that occurred in 2017 due to a computer issue was examined in detail by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency with the company concerned. The lessons learned from that disruption have been shared with all major distributors to increase the resilience of the network.