Health chiefs today said millions of pounds are being wasted in East Sussex as it emerged a stockpile of 43,000 tablets was found at a dead man's home.

The stash is thought to have been amassed over 27 years by a man from Hastings who continually applied for pills he did not need.

Police discovered £2,000-worth of unopened prescription drugs when they found the man - who has not been named - dead in his bed.

There was a ten-year supply of painkillers and a five-year supply of sleeping tablets, some of which had been dispensed more than ten years ago.

Health bosses today said the case was extreme but symptomatic of a wider problem for the NHS, which was costing millions of pounds a year in East Sussex alone.

Gillian Ells, prescribing adviser for Bexhill and Rother Primary Care Trust, said: "I have never in my life seen such a vast amount of drugs.

"I was told that one of the young men who collected the tablets had said that some of them pre-dated him and he was about 18."

Aside from the huge wastage, Mrs Ells said the case provoked concerns about safety as anyone could have gained access to them.

She said a survey carried out last year concluded that £1.3 million worth of prescription drugs were wasted each year in East Sussex.

But Mrs Ells said the questionnaire, which asked community pharmacists to tally up the total of unwanted prescription drugs, was just the tip of the iceberg.

She said: "That was just the stuff that people brought in. Had we launched a dump campaign then the £1.3 million figure would have been much bigger.

"The awful thing is that the lost £1.3 million cannot be recovered, so cannot be spent elsewhere in the NHS.

John Richardson, chief pharmacist at the Conquest Hospital in Hastings, said the NHS spent £6 billion each year on drugs, of which up to £600 million was wasted.

He said: "Faced with the current overspend that the majority of Primary Care Trusts and acute trusts like ours are going through, if we could recoup these huge losses the benefits to the NHS would be massive.

"While the Hastings case is very extreme, there are much smaller scale repetitions in people's houses. It is a real concern."