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Pharmacist turned Labour MP Sadik Al-Hassan tells Arthur Walsh he wants a bright future for the sector – but gets impatient with the bodies that represent it

There is a degree of crossover between the skills of a pharmacist and those a politician draws on in daily life, the Honourable Member for North Somerset tells me when we meet in his office in mid-March. It comes down to “soft skills,” Sadik Al-Hassan says. 

Sadik, a pharmacist with lengthy experience in the community and online sectors who entered parliament as a newly minted MP after Labour’s landslide win last July, explains: “Consultations skills, having the ability to build a quick rapport with somebody and explain complicated issues in a way they will understand by taking the cues from their body language, the level of education they might have. In politics it’s exactly the same.”

And both jobs can involve managing expectations, like when a pharmacist has to tell an irate patient their prescription can’t be dispensed the moment their GP sends it to the pharmacy.

He tells me: “Labour’s slogan in the election was ‘Change’, because as a party we are changed ourselves – but we also want to change the country from what we inherited.” 

He says this is “a big motivation for all of us as MPs” but adds that a near-constant challenge is that “people want change now, and they don’t want us to take time to explain to them why that change can’t be done today… If you look at the ability to explain to somebody why something isn’t happening, again that’s a consultation room skill.” 

He finds himself having the same conversations with pharmacy leaders too. One of the big talking points in the sector when we speak concerns mounting pressure on government to publish an independent economic review commissioned by NHS England and first announced in 2022. 

Hard-up contractors claimed the government didn’t want to publish the results in case it showed just how big the gulf is between what pharmacy needs and what it’s getting. Sadik is having none of it, arguing that from Labour’s perspective: “Why would we give our negotiating information to the people we’re negotiating with? It seems contrary to what would be good negotiating.” 

But this project wasn’t commissioned with the current negotiations in mind, I say – it just so happens to have become a talking point while those talks are being held.

He dismisses this: “The idea that pharmacy doesn’t know what it wants and needs an economic analysis to know what it wants is probably wrong too.” 

Again, I counter that this isn’t just pharmacy’s wish list – it’s an independent piece of work that may, or may not, bolster the sector’s case for funding. 

He sticks to his guns: “We should know what we want and that’s what we should be asking for. Our evidence should be strong enough that we shouldn’t need another report. 

“If you break down the question, it actually undermines our argument. It’s saying we need this because we don’t know what Community Pharmacy England should ask for.” “It’s a bad idea,” he says. “Almost as bad as calling for a sector-wide strike when there’s a new government.” 

An obvious reference to the National Pharmacy Association’s (NPA) recommendation to its members to limit services (not quite a ‘strike’).

So he wasn’t a fan of that course of action? “I’ve always been critical of biting the hand that feeds when you’re about to go into a contract. It is telling that the NPA chose to do that with a Labour government, but not with a Conservative one.” 

Because they thought they’d get more out of Labour? “[They] didn’t go on strike when it was negotiated or in the first, second or third year… which is baffling because everybody was screaming that the contract was killing us. It didn’t make sense to me at all. 

“It’s hard enough to explain to a minister which pharmacy organisation is in front of them, but there are so many different voices – let alone if one of them then decides it’s worth biting the hand that feeds us.” 

So it set back relations with Streeting? “I would worry it did. I think pharmacy was doing very well at punching above its weight… if you look at the amount of money that pharmacy is worth in Stephen Kinnock’s portfolio, I think we actually have, contrary to what everyone thinks, a bigger voice than our pound signs.

“They had all this goodwill they’d earned over the years, talking with MPs, candidates, then right at the point where we’re about to have the outcome of a spending review they went on the attack.” 

Playing devil’s advocate, I point out that Wes Streeting met with the GPs in his first few days as health secretary and then took quite a bit longer to get round to pharmacy.

“We’re a smaller chunk of the healthcare system. Imagine we got a settlement before GPs,” he replies, adding that “they have a significantly larger proportion of health business and money flowing through them.” 

Still, many felt pharmacy had been put on the long finger. “I think we wrote our own story for that. We caused more delays than we probably needed to.”

Could the NPA’s announcement potentially have delayed negotiations? “I think so.” 

Will that have led to more closures? “I guess more pharmacies will have closed during that stalemate period, if it did have an impact on the timing.” 

In his view the sector should instead have taken a “conciliatory tone” and bonded with MPs over shared experiences under the Tories. “But we then decided to go on the attack instead of talking to our friends.” 

What does pharmacy need? 

These disputes aside, a new agreement is imminent. What would a fairer settlement look like for pharmacy? Sadik says he supports a funding uplift of around four per cent in addition to supplementary cash to cover the “burden to the industry” of the living wage and national insurance hikes. 

“That would be enough to stabilise the sector,” he says. He doesn’t envisage a five-year contract, instead anticipating short-term arrangements to buy time during which to think through the implications of the 10-year plan for the health service. 

And while he says there is “no way” the sector will get an inflationary pay rise, he acknowledges: “It’s hard for pharmacy to operate with the unknown. We’ve had £800m as our purchasing profit set in stone for five years when inflation has gone up 28 per cent.” 

I ask him how he would feel about voting down a Lords amendment exempting pharmacies from paying higher national insurance contributions from April – something he went on to do the week after our interview. 

While he doesn’t agree with what he describes as picking apart the national insurance bill, he does say: “It would be personally a very difficult vote for me. I think I’d be able to vote against it if I knew the settlement was going to include that money.”

But he thinks there are far bigger worries than money. “Pharmacy doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. We’ve lost who we are as a profession.”

He’s pretty scathing about Pharmacy First, opining that rather than the “great contract revolution” it was billed as, it “is spreading us thin” and treats pharmacists as if they “can only handle minor issues”. 

He thinks it threatens the sector by positioning it as a release valve for work traditionally carried out by other providers rather than giving it “safe professional territory to call our own”. 

But pharmacy’s unique role has traditionally been medicine supply; isn’t that dwindling in financial importance? 

He thinks the whole system needs breaking down and putting back together again to “fit more along what we are experts in,” namely medicines. 

“My view is if you look at the natural boundaries that occur through professions, GPs diagnose, pharmacist prescribe. 

“I will check what a GP has prescribed and tell them if it’s wrong and ask them to furnish a new prescription. It just begs the question, if we’re experts in what’s prescribed and supplying the medicines, why aren’t we doing the decision making?”

This is partly because the technology still isn’t there, he says. “We don’t have the full picture for prescribing decisions at the moment.”

Isn’t Pharmacy First a stepping stone to being able to deploy a workforce of IP-qualified pharmacists? 

On the contrary, he says there is still “no plan” for putting IP-qualified pharmacists’ skills to work at scale, despite an explicit reference to a prescribing service in Labour’s manifesto. 

“I haven’t seen further detail,” he says though he hopes it will be announced in the 2025-26 deal. 

He does not have IP annotation himself: “When I was in 2nd year at university, I was told don’t worry – they’ll probably change the degree course and you’ll be a prescriber. And that continued. I think I found quite a distinct role in community pharmacy and it was fulfilling for me. But do I think it’s professionally fulfilling for all pharmacists out there? 

“I mean, pharmacists shouldn’t be doing accuracy checks. We should have ACTs to do that because they’re better at it, right? Pharmacists should be doing clinical checks; we should be checking the validity of prescribing; we should be intervening and giving advice; we should be doing New Medicine Service consultations. 

“We possibly even should be doing Medicines Use Reviews. The options are limitless.”

Firm views 

Over the course of our hour-long conversation, we breeze through numerous topics and it seems there are few on which Sadik does not have a settled and firmly held opinion.

At one point I remind him of an exchange I had witnessed some weeks prior in a press briefing on drugs shortages arranged by the All-Party Pharmacy Group in Westminster. 

Martin Sawer of the Healthcare Distribution Association, the trade body for UK wholesalers, had said – or at the very least implied – to an audience of MPs that a major cause of shortages is the diversion of product by small pharmacy businesses with wholesale licences. 

Sadik grilled Sawer pretty insistently on this, and I ask him now what was going through his mind. He replies without hesitating: “You can’t make a statement like that without backing it up, and the evidence he had to back it up was that his friend had told him. 

“That’s not really evidence, and it’s not evidence you should be bringing into Parliament. When you speak in Parliament, you better say the truth with evidence to back it up. Blaming somebody else for an unknown proportion of problems seems some weak tea.” 

He says that as superintendent at online pharmacy PillTime he was responsible for purchasing, commenting: “I’m very familiar with wholesaling, I understand how it works. The idea there’s a pharmacy sitting somewhere with 20 cases of Creon… it isn’t the case. 

“If he wants to come back to me with the evidence, I’m more than willing to see it.”

Duplication of effort

He’s no less forthcoming about NHS England (NHSE). The news of its abolition will come a few days after our conversation, but Streeting had already signalled his plans for a huge jobs cull. 

Sadik thinks there is little point to the institution, arguing that there’s far too much duplication of work with bodies from MHRA to NHSE to ICBs all having input on medicines pricing, for example: “All of them recommending different things and restricting access of new medicines to patients that could benefit… All of them doing the same work over and over again. 

“The Ministry of Defence controls the army. There isn’t an organisation called Guns England that tells the army how to operate, right? You can’t have two separate command structures.” 

He says Streeting’s restructure “will give the DHSC the command and control it needs to do radical reforms in the health system. Treatment happens by pharmacists, nurses, doctors, surgeons, physiotherapists. It doesn’t happen by the management structure of NHSE.” 

Sadik also believes Community Pharmacy England should review its structures. “CPE represents the employers – it does not represent the workforce.” 

Does that give it less legitimacy? “I think so. I strongly encourage CPE to have a workforce component as part of its negotiation.” 

He’d like to see pharmacists and support staff represented at committee level in the organisation, explaining that: “The reason we need a workforce voice is because if you look at what Labour stands for, we are here to help working people as well as the economy and the defence of the nation. It’s there in the name: ‘Labour’.

“Without that voice at the table, pharmacy has never been able to shake the idea that we are private businesses out to make money out of the NHS.

“Technicians and dispenser should be part of the voice of pharmacy because otherwise we create a really crap job for them. If it’s only what the employer wants and not the voice of the people doing the work, things won’t change.” 

Life as an MP can be demanding, he says. “The workload is infinite. There’s an infinite amount of things that people need help with. I get as many emails a day as the customer service department in the company I used to work for.” 

He works around 75 hours a week – “quite a hefty chunk of time, but that’s the choice” – and is forced to spend half the week in Westminster away from his family. 

But Sadik, the father of two young boys, says he is determined to leave public services in a better place than before Labour entered government: “I want my kids to grow up in a world where they have the safety nets to pick them up if they fall down.” 

Reality check 

It was the premature birth of his younger son that laid bare to him how bad things had got and inspired him to enter politics.

Before that, it had been “very easy for me not to see the changes that had happened in our society”. 

But seeing the strain hospital services were under was “a massive slap in the face,” prompting him to join the Labour Party. “Everybody who works in the health system or any public services knows how broken the structures we have inherited are,” he says. 

Like most MPs, he won’t be drawn on whether he has any ministerial ambitions. But he seems to be warming to political life and appears set to go on shaping conversations in pharmacy and beyond.