savings over 5 years
medicines kept in the UK
Medicines UK represents off-patent medicines manufacturers. The industry supplies more than 80% of NHS medicines and saves the NHS £18bn a year. Despite this, they lacked the same profile with Government that originators have. Manufacturers pay a percentage of their branded medicines sales back to the NHS.
Known as VPAG, the tax kicks in when the spend is higher than agreed with industry. We needed to deliver a campaign against this rising tax because it threatened to make many branded generics and biosimilars financially unviable. This meant essential daily and cancer medicines were at risk of being withdrawn from the UK market.
We ran a fully integrated policy, media and digital campaign to influence the negotiations that Medicines UK had been excluded from. The priority was to demonstrate the disproportionate impact of this tax on the off-patent sector.
Our campaign generated significant awareness with multiple stakeholders and ultimately helped shape the final pricing agreements. We helped secure a reduction in the level of tax paid on off-patent medicines sold to the NHS for the next five years. This meant total industry savings of over £60bn.
