To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions he has had with pharmaceutical companies on planning for the UK leaving the EU without a deal.

The Government has now agreed the Withdrawal Agreement with the European Commission. As a consequence, the Department does not expect market access to medicines for the United Kingdom to change under the terms of that agreement during the implementation period, which will run from March 2019 until December 2020.

As a responsible Government, however, we continue to prepare proportionately for all scenarios, including the unlikely outcome that we leave the European Union without any deal in March 2019.

On 23 August 2018, the Department wrote to all pharmaceutical companies that supply prescription only medicines and pharmacy medicines to the UK that come from, or via, the EU or European Economic Area (EEA) asking them to ensure a minimum of six weeks additional supply in the UK, over and above existing business-as-usual buffer stocks, by 29 March 2019.

Since then, we have received very good engagement from industry who share our aims of ensuring continuity of medicines supply for patients is maintained and able to cope with any potential delays at the border that may arise in the short term in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

On 7 December, we wrote again to those companies to inform them of the Government’s updated border planning assumptions and planned response to those.

We followed that up with a request for more detailed information about their current supply routes in order to support the rerouting of medicines required in a no deal scenario