The General Pharmaceutical Council's (GPhC) is one step closer to securing covert surveillance powers, it has announced.

The GPhC was confident it had a "good case" for seeking greater powers to carry out mystery-shopper tests, chief executive Duncan Rudkin told C+D in an exclusive interview yesterday (April 15), after it received support from the Office of Surveillance Commissioners (OSC).

The GPhC agreed to pursue the extra powers, first reported by C+D in February, at its meeting last week (April 11) and has written to the Department of Health asking for a change in legislation.

"We'd be gathering evidence in those rare cases where we have reason to believe there may be something seriously untoward going on" Duncan Rudkin, GPhC

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Mr Rudkin said he was unaware of any other health-professional regulators seeking the same powers, but stressed that pharmacy regulation raised specific challenges. "We're slightly different because we have this remit around enforcing and setting standards for pharmacy businesses," he told C+D. "So we'd be gathering evidence in those rare cases where we have reason to believe there may be something seriously untoward going on."

The GPhC announced its plans to pursue the extra powers after the BBC reported in December that nine London pharmacies were allegedly selling POMs, such as temazepam and Valium, illegally for cash.

Mr Rudkin said the GPhC's "good track record" in using its existing powers should strengthen its case. The regulator received a positive report from the OSC on its use of overt test purchases in January.

"We've got a clean bill of health from the surveillance commissioners... so we think we can say that we could be trusted to use these [extra] powers responsibly," he argued.

But Mr Rudkin could not commit to how long the plans would take to come to fruition and stressed it would be a "long process" to gain approval from the government.

"If the government agrees we should have [the powers], the next step would always be to find a way of updating the law and that often isn't straightforward," he revealed. "We're beginning that process so I think, at this stage, it wouldn't be too clever of me to put a timetable around it."