Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Request

You asked us:

‘Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am requesting the following data regarding sleep medicine commissioning and hypnotic prescribing within the Greater Manchester area.

1. Hypnotic Prescribing Data (BNF 4.1.1): For the most recent 24-month period available, please provide:

a. The total number of prescription items dispensed for drugs within BNF 4.1.1 (Hypnotics).

b. The total Net Ingredient Cost (NIC) for these items.

c. Please provide this data broken down by month and, if possible, by Sub-ICB Location (SICBL).

I have previously contacted the NHS Greater Manchester team who directed to ask NHS Business Services Authority for this information.’

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 1 May 2026.

We have handled your request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.

Our response

Under Section 21 of the FOIA, we are not required to provide information in response to a request if it is already reasonably accessible to you.

The information you requested is available from the web link below:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/english-prescribing-dataset-epd-with-snomed-code

To access this, you need to filter individually for the BNF Presentations that comprise the Hypnotics BNF Paragraph. After this is done, you will be able to get the number of items and Net Ingredient Cost for each month for relevant items prescribed in England. The EPD also aggregates the data by SICBL, this can be done using column PCO_CODE.

There is a User Guide providing to assist with filtering the EPD, this is linked at the top of the page on every monthly dataset.

As an alternative, you could also access the annual or monthly PCA data here:

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/statistical-collections/prescription-cost-analysis-england

(annual up until 2025/25 FY) with additional months up until Feb 26 here:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/prescription-cost-analysis-pca-monthly-data

This would cover items dispensed in England and would be much easier to extract as it can be filtered using Hypnotics on the BNF_PARAGRAPH. However, it does not aggregate the data by SICBL.

Please see the following link to view the section 21 in full - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/21