Vets in the UK face legally binding limits on what they can charge for prescriptions from this week, as a package of eleven new rules comes into force across the profession.
Written prescription fees will be capped at £21 for the first medicine and £12.50 for each additional medicine issued in the same consultation, the BBC reports. Practices must also tell pet owners when cheaper online alternatives exist and publish their price lists, changes introduced following the Competition and Markets Authority’s investigation into the veterinary sector.
The reforms give owners the right to leave a clinic with a written prescription and buy the same medication from an online veterinary pharmacy, which critics of current pricing say can cost 30 to 50 per cent less for routine treatments such as flea, worm and joint products.
Surgery owners have warned the changes will squeeze incomes at a time when the profession faces staff shortages and rising costs. The CMA concluded that fees for prescriptions had become unreasonable and that pet owners lacked the price information needed to compare, a finding it says justified intervention without full price regulation across the sector.
Charities welcomed the move. Pet owners in financial difficulty often face an impossible choice between paying practice prices and going without treatment, and the disclosure rules are designed to make the cheaper route visible at the counter rather than something that takes research to find.
Surgeries have been given a short period to bring the changes in, with the price list requirement among the first duties to bite. Enforcement sits with the CMA, which has signalled it will monitor compliance through mystery shopping and complaint data.
For the big veterinary groups the economics are manageable; prescription fees are a small share of revenue. For independent practices, particularly in areas with little online pharmacy competition, the caps remove what has been an easy margin.
The wider question is whether transparency alone changes owner behaviour. The CMA’s answer for now is to unstick the market at the prescription counter and see what happens to prices on either side of it. Owners get a simple rule of thumb from Tuesday: a paper script should cost no more than twenty-one pounds.