The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7464 p162
11 August 2007

Society summary

Society seeks to recover costs from premises fees

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society has written to the Department of Health requesting that the premises retention fee be increased by 56 per cent from £156 to £243 for 2008. It is also seeking 6 per cent rises in the initial registration fee and the restoration (penalty) fee from their current level of £492 to £520 for 2008.

Fees payable to the Society relating to premises must be recommended by the Secretary of State for Health then fixed by the Secretary of State for Social Services by regulation under the Medicines Act 1968.

The Society has applied for the increases on the basis of full cost recovery for the activities involved in discharging its duties to register and inspect pharmacy premises.

In a letter to the head of pharmacy at the Department of Health, the Society’s director of finance and resources, Bernard Kelly, wrote that for a number of years the Society has used its surplus from its publishing business to subsidise both its regulatory and professional activities. However, in the future, the new regulator that will be formed as a result of the White Paper on health professional regulation will have no subsidy available. Therefore, it is essential that it begins its activities on a firm basis and with an equitable fee structure.

“We believe our proposal goes some considerable way to help the regulator achieve this objective,” Mr Kelly added.

He wrote that the new regulator’s relationship with the profession would be coloured “if it is seen to be disproportionately deriving income from individual pharmacists and as a result seen to be favouring pharmacy owners through a disproportionately low fee for the register for pharmacy premises”.

Mr Kelly explained that in prior years it had only been the costs of the pharmacy inspectors themselves that the Society had sought to recover by way of premises fees. All other regulatory activity had fallen to the Society to fund from its other sources of revenue, primarily its members’ fees and its publication activities.

He added: “We are seeking to address this anomaly by ensuring the premises fee is set at a level which bears an appropriate proportion of the Society’s regulatory costs.”