Northern Ireland (NI) health minister Mike Nesbitt yesterday (May 13) announced that “£4m has been earmarked for community pharmacies” to help cover the rise in employer National Insurance Contributions (NICs) introduced last month.
The funding was announced as part of a £40m package for health and social care workers who were exempt from receiving previous financial support from the government to address the NICs hike.
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Nesbitt said that it is “crucially important to support providers who have been hit with additional costs for reasons entirely outside their control”.
“I have therefore decided to take a financial hit rather than leave healthcare providers to deal with the UK government’s hike in NICs by themselves”, he said, stressing that this “would have been deeply unfair and…detrimental to health and social care provision”.
“Mounting financial pressures”
Community Pharmacy Northern Ireland (CPNI) chief executive Gerard Greene welcomed the news, noting that the body had “worked closely with the [health] minister to ensure that the financial impact of these increased staff costs is understood”.
“We have estimated that the total cost of national minimum wage rises, coupled with the NIC cost increases on the sector will be circa £12m in this financial year”, he said, adding that “these costs fall directly to pharmacy owners to cover while trying to balance the books in the face of other mounting financial pressures”.
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Greene stressed that “further stabilising investment is needed for community pharmacy” to ensure that the sector can “continue to work with the Department of Health (DH) to maximise the impact of community-based pharmacy services”.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced in her autumn budget that employer NICs would rise by “1.2 percentage points” to 15% and the national living wage would rise by 6.7% in April.
Since then, both the pharmacy sector and MPs have issued countless calls for the Chancellor to U-turn on the decision and “go back to the drawing board”.
Read more: Minimum wage to rise 6.7% as National Insurance hike confirmed
And in March, representative body Care England announced that it had taken legal action against the government following MPs’ rejection of a bill amendment that would have exempted pharmacies from the employer NICs hike.
Pharmacies in England remain without additional support to help cover the increased costs, after the new funding deal did not contain any specific funding allocation to mitigate the NICs hike.
