The Company Chemists’ Association has hit out at delays to the legislation that will enable hub-and-spoke dispensing after it emerged last week that changes will not come into effect in January 2025 as originally proposed.

The Department of Health has informed Community Pharmacy England that, following the General Election where the progress of these amendments was paused, they are briefing new ministers across all policy areas, including hub-and-spoke dispensing between different pharmacy owners.

As a result, they are now not in a position to implement these proposals from 1 January 2025, as previously intended. CPE says it does do not have further clarity on the timescales but will update the sector once it has more information.

“It’s disappointing that commitments made to support pharmacies in the 2019 contractual framework agreement are the subject of further delays,” said CCA chief executive Malcolm Harrison.

“As part of the 2019 five-year deal, community pharmacy has had to make substantial efficiency savings. In exchange, the DHSC and NHS England committed to enable more efficient operating models with changes to supervision and hub-and-spoke laws.

“It is also still the case that if pharmacies are to be able to benefit from hub-and-spoke arrangements, new clinical services must be commissioned. The costs of establishing and maintaining hub operations are significant, and with little to no profit available in dispensing NHS medicines, it is hard to see how new facilities could be established, or pharmacies could afford to procure assembly services from them.

“Ultimately, policymakers must realise that community pharmacy needs a ‘new deal’ – one that involves an increase in core funding and investment in new clinical services, such as Pharmacy First”.

Gareth Jones, head of corporate affairs at the NPA, said: “It’s better to get this complicated matter right than it is to push through change without a full understanding of the issues, which are highly consequential for independent pharmacies.

“Above all, we need to be very careful not to write community pharmacies out of the equation by careless application of a direct to patients model of dispensing.

“A new and significantly improved community pharmacy funding settlement would be needed to make sense of hub and spoke in the medium term.”

More information about the outcome of the hub-and-spoke consultation can be found on this here.