Free and fairer

The abolition, said a Welsh Tory spokesman, was a "bung to the middle classes." Well, the major proponents of bungs to the better-off should know what they are talking about on the subject, but, this time, they seem to have got it wrong.

The scandal of prescription charging, which hits hardest at the working poor, has been a growing sore on the NHS for many years and the not-so-gradual escalation of the cost has been an increasing burden.

The huge cost of administering a system of charging, with its inbuilt complexities of who is or is not exempt, has always eaten up the bulk of the money raised from those charges and the far greater simplicity of free prescriptions will reduce administrative costs enormously.

And those who will benefit most will not, as the Tories seem to think, be the comfortably off. It will be those with chronic illnesses requiring constant medication.

It will be cancer sufferers who require long-term care and transplant patients who have to take drugs to avoid rejection.

It will be those who have had to avoid work because of the poverty trap implicit in taking low-paid jobs while on courses of complex drug therapies which could leave them worse off if they worked.

It will be people with mental illnesses who require medication to enable them to function normally.

And it will be those who have constant pain from a variety of conditions which require analgesics to lift the quality of their lives to a bearable level.

Wales, of course, has specific problems arising from the industries which filled its industrial past and the chronic conditions which arose from them.

But that country is in no different case to other areas of Britain which had coal mining, steel and other heavy industries.

All these areas suffer from the industrial legacy of chronic bronchial and heart conditions. And the loss of the line of patients queuing up to pay for their medicines will bring sorrow to nobody.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said that her department had no plans to abolish prescription charges and offered as a justification for keeping them that exemption arrangements meant that 87 per cent of prescriptions are dispensed without charge.

A strange justification indeed, when it relies on 13 per cent of patients to raise the estimated £430 million which she quoted for 2006-07.

Wales's Health Minister Dr Brian Gibbons estimates that the free prescriptions scheme will cost about £28 million a year.

Exact figures are not readily available, but it is a good bet that that is less than it cost to administer the previous exemption system.

The whole taxpaying public, as well as those suffering from chronic illnesses, would seem to benefit from this obvious and humane measure and English and Scots people paying an extra 20p from Sunday will certainly feel that the system could be extended to the whole of Britain.