Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many individuals have been wrongly issued with NHS prescription fines due to prescription forms not being updated to include universal credit claimants; and if he will make a statement.

Work is ongoing to update the FP10 prescription form, to include a new exemption tick box for use by Universal Credit (UC) claimants, is underway and the revised form will be introduced at the earliest opportunity. In advance of this update both UC and income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants who meet the criteria for free National Health Service prescriptions are ticking exemption box K on the FP10 prescription form. As a result, the NHS Business Services Authority does not have a data split that enables it to confirm how many penalty charges notices have been issued to UC claimants alone and therefore, how many were issued to UC claimants who had a valid prescription charge exemption.