Conservative health spokesman Chris Grayling writes for ePolitixPlus on the future of community pharmacies.

The future of the community pharmacy is a crucial issue for communities right across the country. Local centres in towns and villages alike are under threat under this government as never before. Already local post offices are disappearing under a programme to close a total of 3000 outlets - after five years of gross mishandling of the Post Office business by this government.

Now a second cornerstone of those local centres is at risk. All around the country millions of people - particularly our elderly people - depend on the local chemist shop to provide them with access to the drugs they need, as well as a friendly word of help and advice. Without those shops, many would struggle to get to the larger and more distant outlets that would inevitably take over from them.

The free market has a very clear and important place in our society - but there are some parts of the local economy which serve a social need, and which we jeopardise at our peril. We cannot afford to lose the excellent services or accessibility currently provided by our community pharmacies.

The weakness in the OFT Report lies in the nature of the prescription dispensing market, which makes up most of the sales of local pharmacies. This is not a free market, where lower prices will lead to growing sales, where competition will improve and increase service standards for all. We are dealing with a tightly regulated and restricted market - where smart business practices cannot increase the size of the available cake for all the businesses that are competing in it.

Put simply, the danger is that if a major supermarket opens a local pharmacist, the prescription business it takes from other pharmacists will come straight off their sales. The risk is that we end up moving around the pieces of the cake - and that the loser is the local village or town centre and the local pharmacy. Which means ultimately that the losers are the elderly and those without transport who will find pharmacy services less available to them.

This does not mean that no change is automatically the right answer. It is right and proper to debate the nature of our pharmacy services, and to explore ways to improve the choice that customers have available to them. But we must be extremely careful about the consequences of any change - we cannot risk the future of a key local service in order to pursue change for its own sake.

And we must also be mindful of the role that the pharmacist plays in healthcare today, and the potential to expand that role in the future. Pharmacists are highly trained, and have very considerable medical knowledge and expertise to use on behalf of the National Health Service. Local pharmacists play a key role in supporting NHS practitioners.

This is a crucial issue for the preservation of both local communities and local healthcare provision. It is also a crucial issue for the elderly and infirm. They depend on their local pharmacy. Our local centres depend on our local pharmacies. The NHS may come to depend more and more on our local pharmacist. We cannot afford changes that would jeopardise the existence of the local pharmacy.

This article first appeared on ePolitixPlus.