Professor John Robertson OBA
From Dispenser payments and prescription cost analysis Financial year 2024 to 2025 published yesterday:
The total (net) cost, which is the final cost to the Scottish Government once item costs, service remuneration, advance payments and patient charges are taken into account, for dispensing items and providing services in 2024/25 was £1.66 billion. This increased by 2.5% from £1.62 billion in 2023/24 and continues a period of largely rising cost, increasing by 29.8% over the last 10 years.
The total number of items reimbursed between 2023/24 and 2024/25 increased by 2.3%, from 114.4 million to 117.0 million items. Over the last 10 years the total number of items reimbursed has increased by 14.5% from 102.2 million items in 2015/16.
You can see how the opposition parties and their media would spin this as the unaffordability of the SNP’s free prescriptions but, there’s something important to add – inflation.
From Hargreaves Lansdown, we can see that, in the same period – The cost of goods and services increased by 60.2% over this period.
Figures based on the Retail Price Index (RPI) as at August 2025. Source: Office for National Statistics. https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator?msockid=040f0c0f8f6f69bb36d418948ed46872
So, the cost of the SNP’s free prescriptions has increased at less than half that of general inflation. How has this happened? Some kind of efficiency in purchasing? Better advice from docs?
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It would be interesting to know the pharmacy costs in those figures and hoe that compares to the rest of the UK.
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