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Health minister Zubir Ahmed has insisted that the UK medicines supply situation has improved markedly over the past year, telling peers that levels of disruption seen in 2024 have “come down quite significantly”, while the “overall supply of medicines is in a good place”.
Giving evidence to the House of Lords Public Services Committee’s inquiry into medicines security on 10 December 2025, Ahmed said it was important to contextualise the scale of the UK medicines supply chain — which covers “over 14,000 products” — and stressed that the first half of 2025 had seen shortages “much lower than they were in 2024,” with supplies returning towards “baseline levels”.
He acknowledged that shortages were often highly visible through media reporting. However, Ahmed told peers that at a system level, the UK was not seeing “any specific issues” of concern, while patient safety incidents related to shortages remained “extremely low”.
Responding to questions about lack of clear reporting of medicines stock data in primary care, Ahmed said the government must balance the desire for clearer national oversight with the “practicalities of daily practice in thousands of individual pharmacy businesses”.
Requiring real-time inventory reporting from community pharmacies or pharmacies would not currently be “practicable” without “diverting frontline staff from their work”, he added.
Also giving evidence to the committee, David Simmons, director for supply resilience and medicines at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), highlighted several active measures to support frontline pharmacy teams, including providing shortage information at the point of prescribing to prevent GPs issuing unavailable medicines.
Simmons also mentioned the current government consultation on pharmacists’ flexibilities, which aims to allow pharmacists greater ability to substitute medicines where appropriate, as well as new patient and pharmacy information leaflets to help explain what to do when a medicine is unavailable.
These step were intended to “help people at the frontline that go to the pharmacy”, ensuring that patients were more likely to receive an appropriate product or timely support if there were supply or shortage issues with their regular medicine, he said.
During the inquiry session, several committee members questioned why the UK does not mandate the use of barcodes on all medicine packs in order to improve supply chain tracking.
Ahmed answered that barcoding alone would not solve the core challenge, “as most community pharmacies operate as individual businesses and not as a single integrated system like a supermarket chain”.
As a result, the difficulty lay not only in applying the barcodes but in “how data would be shared across thousands of providers”, he said.
Simmons added that while pharmacies already use barcodes for dispensing and safety checks, the government does not collect universal, item-level data from across the system. Instead, the DHSC focuses on “targeted products”, particularly those of concern for winter, using wholesalers’ stock and distribution data to monitor pressures, he said.
Peers also asked why the UK does not publicly release a list of clinically critical or at-risk medicines, as some EU nations, such as France, have done.
Ahmed warned that publishing such a list could trigger stockpiling behaviour among the public, which would create the “self-fulfilling prophecy” of the very shortages the system seeks to prevent.
“Early signals of risk did not always represent real-time problems, and that premature publication could worsen pressures,” he explained.
Simmons also noted that the government maintains an internal global risk register, drawing on licensing data to identify vulnerabilities, but prefers a “more agile” approach than fixed lists.
“Different threats create different priorities,” he said, adding that a static set of medicines would be of limited use and could mislead.
