THOUSANDS of benefit claimants are entitled to free NHS prescriptions that can slash their medical expenses.

In England prescriptions cost £9.90 per item, but some benefits give claimants access to free NHS prescriptions.

1

The flat prescription fee is designed to make necessary medication affordable, but if you are taking several prescriptions costs can quickly add up.

So, if you’re eligible, claiming your free prescriptions could make a big difference.

And in some cases the entitlement could also give you free access to over-the-counter remedies.

What benefits grant access to free prescriptions?

You will be entitled to free prescriptions if you or your partner receive:

• Income support
• Income-based jobseeker’s allowance
• Income-related employment and support allowance
• Pension Credit (guarantee element)

You will also be entitled to free prescriptions if you receive Universal Credit and and your earnings for the most recent assessment period were £435 or less, or £935 or less if your claim included an element for a child, or if you have ‘limited capability for work’.

You could also be entitled to free NHS prescriptions if you receive tax credits and your annual family income is £15,276 or less. To claim you must be in receipt of:

• Child tax credit
• Working tax credit and child tax Ccedit paid together
• Working tax credit including a disability element

If you’re entitled to free NHS prescriptions your partner and any dependants under 20 will also be able to claim them.

How to apply?

If you’re automatically entitled you can use your award notice as proof.

When you receive your prescription there a boxes to tick identifying the benefit that grants your entitlement.

For example if you’re claiming through Universal Credit you should tick box ‘U’.

However the NHS has said that some prescriptions may not have a ‘U’ box, if this is the case select box ‘k’ for for income-based jobseeker’s allowance instead.

If you’re entitled to free prescriptions you will also be entitled to free over-the-counter remedies at participating pharmacies, following a consultation with a pharmacist.

Is other help available?

If you’re not automatically entitled to free NHS prescriptions, you may still be able to apply for help through the NHS Low Income Scheme.

If you’re on a low income you can apply for the scheme, as long as your savings or investments don’t exceed a certain value.

You cannot get help if you or your partner (or both) have more than: 

• £16,000 in savings, investments or property (not including the place where you live) 
• £23,250 in savings, investments or property if you live permanently in a care home (£24,000 if you live in Wales)

How much you will receive depends on your weekly income, outgoings as well as savings and investments.

If you are granted support, you may be able to apply for a refund for medical expenses already incurred.

Who else is entitled to free prescriptions

Other people entitled to free NHS prescriptions include:

• Those under 16 years old 
• Those who are 16, 17, or 18 years old and in full-time education 
• People who are 60 or older 
• People with a valid medical exemption certificate (MedEx) for a specified medical condition, such as diabetes, epilepsy, or cancer 
• Those with a valid maternity exemption certificate (MatEx)(issued as soon as your pregnancy is confirmed and valid until a year after birth)
• NHS inpatients
• People in receipt of a war pension exemption certificate and the prescription is for your disability

Other ways to save

Those ineligible for free prescriptions can still make savings by purchasing a Prescription Prepayment Certificate (PPC).

It’s essentially a season ticket, which you pay for once and can use to cover any prescriptions you need for one year.

You can also get them to cover three months.

A one-year PPC costs £111.60, while a three-month PPC will set you back £31.25.

You can buy them on the NHS Business Services Authority’s website or via a registered pharmacy.

The point at which you start saving money with the three-month PPC is after buying four or more prescriptions.

With the one-year PPC, you start making savings after 12 or more purchases.

So, if you need a lot of prescriptions every year, a PPC can definitely be worth your time.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. Third-quarter earnings season is off to a good start. It’s mostly been banks so far. Market volatility has made the trading desks happy; on the retail side, interest margins are holding up better than expected; and the banking sector is up 6 per cent in the last week. In even happier news, the FT Alphaville Pub Quiz is returning to New York on November 12. Unhedged will be hosting a round — we hope to see you there for some wonky questions and a few drinks! Instructions for how to sign up are here. Email us: robert.armstrong@ft.com and aiden.reiter@ft.com. 

Gold

A lot has been written about the gap between consumer sentiment, which remains bad, and employment and wages, which are strong. Something similar is happening in markets: sentiment is increasingly bullish, but gold continues to rally like crazy. This is not a totally anomalous situation, but historically gold has often peaked when investors are feeling insecure. That is not the case today. Here is a chart of the American Association of Individual Investors sentiment survey’s bull-bear spread (I use the 24-week average as it is a very noisy series) plotted against the gold price. The dotted lines mark spots where gold peaked just as sentiment troughed.

It is not just the AAII survey that shows sentiment is strong. Bank of America’s global fund manager survey this month showed the biggest leap in sentiment since June of 2020, along with bond and cash allocations coming down. So why is the price of the classic maybe-something-awful-happens asset, gold, hitting epic highs?

Unhedged has written several times before about the oddness of this gold rally. To recap the main points:

• The gold price does not seem to be responding in a straightforward way to inflation or money printing. Gold rose when the first emergency fiscal and monetary actions increased the money supply in 2020. But then it went sideways as the money supply expanded further and inflation took hold. It was only after the Federal Reserve started absorbing liquidity, rates rose and inflation was slowing that gold really started to jump. Here is the gold price, M2 money, and the CPI price index rebased to 1 as of January 2020: 

• The normal relationship between gold and real interest rates has broken. The real interest rate is the opportunity cost of owning a yieldless metal, so when real rates rise, gold tends to fall. Not this time:

• Similarly, gold and the dollar strengthened in tandem for much of this year. Usually, because gold is priced in dollars and inversely related to US interest rates, they move in opposite directions. The relationship has normalised somewhat recently.

• Gold mining stocks are not participating in the rally. The chart below, from James Luke of Schroders, shows the ratio of the gold price to the price of the VanEck Gold Miners ETF (the green line). Miners are very cheap compared to the metal. The blue line is the current gold mining industry “all-in sustaining cost margin” for producing an ounce of gold. The margin is very high indeed. A strange combination, and one that suggests that investors in gold miners — to the degree there are any of those left — do not believe $2,700 gold is going to last. 

As a way to make sense of these oddities, one might ask, who is buying all the gold? In particular, who has been buying it since it passed $2,100, the level at which many experts thought demand from price-sensitive buyers would dry up?

The first candidate is central banks. They did significantly increase the portion of their foreign exchange reserves held in gold in 2022 and 2023. But, according to the World Gold Council’s demand report, central bank demand is roughly flat in the first half of 2024.

Investment demand — ingots, coins, ETFs — also seems to be flattish relative to last year. While the holding of gold ETFs are rising a bit, they are still lower than they were last year at this time. Here’s a chart from Josh Wolfson at RBC:

Jewellery demand does not seem to be the culprit, either. Chinese and Indian jewellery demand, an important part of the global picture, has fallen dramatically as prices have risen and the Chinese economy has slowed, according to the WGC.

Who is driving the price then? I have heard various theories: sovereign wealth funds buying on the sly and hedge funds chasing the price are the most popular. Certainly, it is the case that momentum-driven quant funds will pursue any price with a strong upward trend. 

Whoever the marginal buyer is, the move from $2,000 to $2,700, if it should be sustained in any meaningful way in the months to come, does suggest that gold may be becoming a slightly different kind of asset.

Of course it could be that gold is responding to the fact that there are wars in Europe and the Middle East, as well as acute electoral uncertainty in the US. Indeed, geopolitical worry is almost surely part of the story. But if it were the whole story, shouldn’t stocks be falling, and bond volatility be rising?

In a world awash in liquidity, gold may have become another asset investors buy when they decide they have too much cash on their balance sheets. If something like this is true, it would suggest that gold will act more like a risk asset, and less like a hedge, in the future.

A quite different explanation is that gold, rather than responding to short- or medium-term moves in rates, inflation and the money supply, is making an adjustment to the expectation that we are in a new, more fiscally profligate regime where the neutral rate of interest is higher, central banks are under more pressure, and inflationary incidents are more common. In such a world, gold might deserve a somewhat larger place in the optimal portfolio.

As something of a gold sceptic, I am struggling to accept any of these hypotheses. But I would be very keen to hear readers’ views.

One good read

Flood insurance should probably be more expensive.

FT Unhedged podcast

Can’t get enough of Unhedged? Listen to our new podcast, for a 15-minute dive into the latest markets news and financial headlines, twice a week. Catch up on past editions of the newsletter here.

An increase in capital gains tax (CGT) is top of mind for advisers, with the majority believing it is one of the most likely announcements in the upcoming Budget, research by Royal London has revealed.

In a survey, the life, pensions and investment mutual asked advisers their thoughts on the most talked about Budget in recent years.

Over three quarters (78%) said they believe CGT changes are the most likely outcome.

The research suggested 50% of advisers are predicting changes to pensions tax relief, followed by 38% who think the chancellor will introduce income tax on defined contribution death benefits for someone who dies before the age of 75.

Additionally, 25% are predicting a change to salary sacrifice for employer contributions.

At the other end of the spectrum, only 8% of respondents think the chancellor will make changes to Isa limits.

When asked what they would do if they were chancellor and had to save money on pensions, the responses varied from reducing tax relief on contributions (57%) to National Insurance changes (22%).

Notably, only 8% would reduce the level of tax-free cash to £100,000.

Just over a third of those questioned (36%) have been proactively contacting clients about the Budget.

Conversely, over 80% of advisers have seen an increase in the number of clients contacting them about taking action in relation to their pension.

That increase is significant for around a quarter of those Royal London surveyed.

Of those getting in touch, 94% of clients who had not taken any tax-free cash are asking about taking it all ahead of the Budget.

A smaller, but still significant 40% of respondents have clients who had planned to take tax free cash in stages and move the rest to drawdown or an uncrystallised funds pension lump sum but now want to take the full amount.

Meanwhile, 7% have asked about taking tax-free cash and buying an annuity.

While most advisers predict a change to CGT, they have seen a much smaller number of clients (41%) getting in touch to take action in relation to assets that might be subject to CGT.

Royal London director of policy Jamie Jenkins said: “Every fiscal event comes with its fair share of speculation, but this one is shaping up to be the most talked about Budget for years, with most commentators now expecting a range of tax changes to be announced.

“At this stage, most advisers are fully expecting changes that will affect their clients and the advice they provide to them, but the speculation is shifting on a daily basis, leaving advisers in a difficult position.

“Meantime, it’s clear that clients are getting anxious about possible changes that may affect their finances, and some are bringing forward elements of their retirement plans.”