“The Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA) is currently supporting a small group of members who are collectively owed more than £200,000 in unpaid locum fees by just one pharmacy business,” it announced this week (June 2).
The amount of locum debt recovered by the PDA has “increased dramatically over the last few years with more than £100,000” recuperated each year, it said.
In 2024, the union reached “a record” of recovering more than £126,600 representing “almost £2,500 each week on average”, it added.
Read more: ‘Shocking’: Unpaid locum fees hit highest ever level this year
And in the first four and a half months of this year alone, the body has already recovered £54,000, the PDA revealed.
This could “reach £1 million by the year’s end” in debts recovered from “rogue employers who have refused to honour the contracts they agreed”, it said.
“Pay your debts”
PDA union general secretary Mark Pitt stressed that “businesses must pay locums for the services they have provided”, adding that “it should not be necessary for the PDA to intervene to make it happen”.
The union assists “members who cannot get paid by certain employers without our help” every year, he said, noting that the PDA’s “simple message to these businesses is ‘pay your debts’”.
Read more: ‘Wage theft’: PDA helps locum pharmacists recover £65k in 2023
“Where businesses repeatedly refuse to pay their debts, there seem to be no consequences for the pharmacy owners other than individuals taking legal action to recover what is owed to them”, Pitt said.
And he added that this is “a further example of how the treatment of businesses by the regulator contrasts to that of individual registrants”.
Wage woes
It comes as C+D exclusively revealed that Jhoots pharmacies failed to pay staff their January wages, leaving employees facing eviction and unable to “afford school lunches”.
Jhoots said at the time that there was a technical issue while processing January’s payments that led to a portion of staff not being paid but that this had been resolved and all staff paid.
Read more: Staff struggle to feed their kids after Jhoots missed January wages
But in February, C+D revealed that Jhoots Chemist Limited’s sole owner Sarbjit Singh Jhooty was embroiled in another pay dispute, the stress of which led one pharmacy staff member to miscarry, she claimed.
A group of 14 locum pharmacists told C+D that their branches were run by SD Pharmacy - a company owned by “a group of doctors” - when they stopped receiving payment in July 2024.
Read more: Jhooty and the GPs: Employee pins miscarriage on pay stress as staff owed thousands
Jhooty took over SD Pharmacy in September last year and since then, another four employees at the pharmacies told C+D they began to have issues receiving wages, sick pay and maternity pay.
At the time, Jhoots said that it took over the company to secure “the longevity of the pharmacies” but that the “full scale of the debts was not clear” and “the monies owed to pharmacists by SD Pharmacy were for shifts completed prior to [Jhooty’s] ownership”.
