The contraceptive Pill will be available from chemists without a prescription next year in an attempt to tackle Britain’s persistent problem of teenage pregnancy.

Under the pilot scheme, women will be able to have a private consultation with a pharmacist, where any health risks will be assessed, before obtaining the Pill free.

Like doctors, pharmacists will be able to give the Pill to girls under 16 without their parents’ consent if they believe that they are at risk of becoming pregnant.

The Pill has been available for 45 years in the UK and is now used by about four million women. It is the most popular form of contraception, beating the condom into second place.

If the pilot proves a success, the Pill will be available at chemists nationwide. It is currently only available with a prescription from a GP surgery or family planning clinic, although chemists can dispense the morning-after Pill without a doctor’s signature.

The Royal Society of Medicine said that it was delighted with the news, which it believed would help to address the stubbornly high rate of teenage pregnancy.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, president of the Royal Society, had been campaigning for the move. “We have this catastrophic tidal wave of teenage and unwanted pregnancies — we are the worst in Europe, we cannot ignore that,” she said.

However, Trevor Stammers, a GP and a trustee of education charity Family and Youth Concern, said that even greater access to contraception, which is already freely available, was not the answer to the sexual health crisis. He said: “Because the Government refuses to contemplate sex education aimed at delaying young people’s sexual debut they have to put all their effort into increasing availability of contraception, but it will not work. They have increased availability of the morning-after Pill and it has made no difference at all in the number of unwanted pregnancies.”

The UK has the highest teenage birth rate in Western Europe, twice as high as Germany, three times as high as France and six times as high as the Netherlands. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in England during 2005 7,462 girls under-16 became pregnant. The number of under-18s who became pregnant was 39,683. Although there has been a fall in recent years, progress has stalled and the Government is well away from meeting its target of halving the 1998 rate by 2010, which would require a 10 per cent fall each year between now and then.

The latest move was announced yesterday by Lord Darzi of Denham, the Health Minister in charge of NHS reform. He said that the Government would work with chemists to ensure there were robust standards and appropriate training. The decision to pilot the scheme follows rising complaints about closures of family planning clinics, a result of the financial problems effecting many primary care trusts.

Anne Weyman, head of the Family Planning Association, said that the initiatives was extremely welcome, but that it would not make up for the lack of availability of more expensive, long-lasting methods of contraception, such as the new intrauterine devices thatsome doctors fail to offer to keep down costs. “It’s absolutely essential that this initiative is part of a comprehensive and holistic approach to broaden women’s access to all 14 methods of contraception and not just the Pill,” she said.

Brief history

— The Pill was developed by Dr Carl Djerassi in Mexico more than 50 years ago

— It was introduced in Britain in 1961 for married women. Single women had to wait until 1967

— Now used by 24 per cent of all women in UK aged 16 to 49

— Numbers dipped in 1980s after scares over blood clots and stroke

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