Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Request

You asked us:

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information from the NHS Business Services Authority. Please can you provide me with:

1. The number of people who paid for at least 12 prescriptions at £9.65 (and £9.90 after 1 May 2024) per prescription in the 2023/2024 financial year.

2. How many people in the 2023/2024 financial year had an active 3-month prescription prepayment certificate (PPC)?

3. How many people in the 2023/2024 financial year had an active 12-month PPC?

4. The average number of prescriptions purchased by people who paid for 12 or more prescriptions in the 2023/24 financial year.

5. The average number of prescriptions purchased by people overall in the 2023/2024 financial year.

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 7 March 2025.

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 on the NHSBSA website https://nhsbsadata.shinyapps.io/ppc-savings-and-beneficiaries/.

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

Please read the below notes to ensure correct understanding of the data.

Questions 1, 4 and 5

Please note that the figures published in the report are the number of prescription charges.

Questions 2 and 3

The information published is the number of certificates issued in the 2023/24 financial year.

With regards to identifying the number of people with active certificates we have considered this request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

The NHSBSA does hold the requested information; however as there is no unique person identifier for PPC certificates. We therefore estimate that the cost of compliance with the request would exceed the appropriate limit under section 12 of the FOIA.

We estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving, extracting and checking the information.

Please see the following calculations which sets out the estimated cost for compliance with this request:

We estimate that a manual interrogation of each PPC record would take one minute per PPC record, and with there being around five million PPC records for 2023/24 this would take 5,000,000 minutes or over 83,000 hours.

Please be advised that due to the way that the information is held by the NHSBSA, it is not possible to submit a refined request under the appropriate limit, and therefore we have provided the number of certificates issued in the financial year.

Please see the following link to view the section 12 in full - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/12

Publishing this response

Please note that this information will be published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02646

Your personal details will be removed from the published response.

Data Queries

Please contact foirequests@nhsbsa.nhs.uk ensuring you quote the above reference if you have any specific questions regarding this response; or, if you feel you may be misunderstanding or misinterpreting the information; or, if you plan on publishing the data.

Reusing the data and copyright

If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data please contact communicationsteam@nhsbsa.nhs.uk. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence detailed at:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the following statement: “NHSBSA Copyright 2025” Failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence.

Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.