Larger pharmaceutical companies have also been known to enter into agreements with their competitors which prevent those competitors from marketing certain products at all, as recently illustrated by the investigation of GlaxoSmithKline by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s primary competition and consumer authority.

In that case, the CMA held that GlaxoSmithKline had made payments in excess of £50 million to competing generic manufacturers in return for them not marketing cheaper generic versions of Seroxat.

These are not the only competition law issues that pharmacy businesses may encounter. Larger companies in particular may be subject to certain merger and acquisition controls, particularly where wholesalers and pharmacies are under common ownership. This is because wholesalers may choose to offer more favourable commercial terms to those pharmacies within its group than pharmacies it supplies outside of the group but in which it has no direct financial interest.

Equally, if two or more different pharmacies operating in one area have common ownership, it is easy to see how a monopoly on the supply of pharmaceutical services could be abused. This is a factor that NHS England considers when assessing pharmacy contract applications.