Pharmacy minister Earl Howe has downplayed the impact of medicines shortages in the UK, telling MPs that there is "no hard evidence" of patient harm from shortages and claiming that government supply chain measures are working "very smoothly".

Addressing the All-Party Pharmacy Group (APPG) inquiry into medicines shortages on Monday (March 26), the minister stressed that he was not complacent about shortages, but he argued that it was important to have a "sense of scope" and said many people, including pharmacists, would be "completely unaware" of many shortages averted by the Department of Health (DH).

The comments faced opposition from APPG chair Kevin Barron, who said the group had seen examples of patients being hospitalised because of medicine shortages. Earl Howe's comments also contradict the results of C+D's Stocks Survey 2011, which found more than 140 pharmacists had seen a patient's health suffer in the past year because of supply problems, with issues including mental health patients seeing their conditions worsen and patients referred to hospital.

But Earl Howe claimed the DH had "consistently asked all members of the supply chain" about anything that materially damaged the interests of patients. "As far as I'm aware, we don't have hard evidence of patient harm," he said.

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The minister went to on to restate his position that the government was reluctant to take any further regulatory action to resolve the problems. Supply chain measures were "working very smoothly" and "collaborative working" was the only way to tackle the issue, he stressed. "We have no convincing evidence that [further regulation of the supply chain] even if it could be adequately defined, would improve the market's operation or the safety of patients."

But industry leaders and MPs reacted angrily to the news, stressing that patients were in danger and calling for more action to address the problems.  The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) said the problems were "getting worse, not better". And executive director of the British Association of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers (BAPW) Martin Sawer told C+D it was clear that patient health was at risk.

"The minister says he uses the PSNC branded shortages list as a guide to medicines that patients have difficulty obtaining," he said. "Surely this is evidence, if a medicine is a transplant therapy, insulin or a cancer treatment, for example, that there is a serious risk of patient health suffering."

Mr Sawer also called for improved monitoring of the problems, saying: "Then maybe the DH will see a case for regulation."

Home affairs select committee chair Keith Vaz MP, who last month put forward a parliamentary motion to raise awareness of shortages, said ministers needed to acknowledge the scale of the problem and act quickly to resolve the issue. "We should not be in a position where patients need to be hospitalised because they cannot get the drugs they need," he said. Mr Vaz added that health minister Simon Burns had told him that 65 MPs had already raised the issue with the DH.