Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the context of "Executive agency"

A regulatory agency (regulatory body, regulator) or independent agency (independent regulatory agency) is a government authority that is responsible for exercising autonomous jurisdiction over some area of human activity in a licensing and regulating capacity. Examples of responsibilities include strengthening safety and standards, and/or to protect consumers in markets where there is a lack of effective competition. Examples of regulatory agencies that enforce standards include the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the United Kingdom; and, in the case of economic regulation, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets and the Telecom Regulatory Authority in India.

A Product Licence Number (or PL code for short) is a unique identifier on the packaging of medicines, used to uniquely identify the product. This code will normally remain the same despite the varying marketing and branding of the companies selling it, this means for example two sets of packaging that look different (say a "big brand" and a shops "own brand") can be easily identified as actually being exactly the same product inside.

The code itself is issued by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the UK and the European Medicines Agency.

The British Pharmacopoeia (BP) is the national pharmacopoeia of the United Kingdom. It is an annually published collection of quality standards for medicinal substances in the UK, which is used by individuals and organisations involved in pharmaceutical research, development, manufacture and testing.

Pharmacopoeial standards are publicly available and legally enforceable standards of quality for medicinal products and their constituents. The British Pharmacopoeia is an important statutory component in the control of medicines, which complements and assists the licensing and inspection processes of the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). Together with the British National Formulary (BNF), the British Pharmacopoeia defines the UK's pharmaceutical standards.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for government policy on health and adult social care matters in England, along with a few elements of the same matters which are not otherwise devolved to the Scottish Government, Welsh Government or Northern Ireland Executive. It oversees the English National Health Service (NHS). The department is led by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care with three ministers of state and three parliamentary under-secretaries of state.

The department develops policies and guidelines to improve the quality of care and to meet patient expectations. It carries out some of its work through arms-length bodies (ALBs), including executive non-departmental public bodies such as NHS England and the NHS Digital, and executive agencies such as the UK Health Security Agency and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The DHSC also manages the work of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

The National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) is a government agency that works in the field of biological standardisation and is part of the United Kingdom's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). It is responsible for developing and producing over 90% of the biological international standards in use around the world.

The Institute is the UK's Official Medicines Control Laboratory, responsible for independent regulatory testing of biological medicines within the framework of the European Union. It is also host to the UK's stem cell bank and is a key research centre in the field of pandemic influenza.