Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
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The Minister for Care (Stephen Kinnock)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) on raising this important issue. The number of hon. Members present shows how vital community pharmacy is right across our country.
Since coming into office, this Government have continued to reverse the decades of cuts to community pharmacy, and have frozen prescription charges for the second year in a row to help our constituents with the cost of living. Wherever they live in the country, women can now get emergency contraception from their local pharmacy free of charge on the NHS. That work has only been possible thanks to the tireless efforts and dedication of pharmacy teams in supporting patients in their communities, delivering a wide range of NHS services, not least in the west country. In fact, just last week, I was in Bristol visiting the fantastic Concord pharmacy, which is at the forefront of our efforts to shift care from hospital to community. I thank Saeed and his team for the warm welcome they gave me. I saw how they are delivering blood pressure checks, vaccinations and Pharmacy First services to the people of north Bristol.
For too long, community pharmacies such as Concord have been held back from realising their true potential. It is why the Government have given them a central role in our 10-year plan to shift the focus of the NHS from sickness to prevention, from hospital to community and from analogue to digital.
Gordon McKee (Glasgow South) (Lab)
An excellent example of community pharmacies in England embracing innovation is their interaction with the NHS app. My constituents in Scotland do not have access to a similar app because the Scottish Government have not got on with fixing it. Will the Minister join me in calling on the Scottish Government to produce a proper equivalent NHS app, so that constituents in Scotland can benefit in the same way?
Stephen Kinnock
My hon. Friend makes a vital point. It appears that the Scottish Government are stuck in the analogue age, and we need digital solutions. I join him in encouraging the Scottish Government to get with the programme, get with the NHS app and get moving on some of these important initiatives.
We all know that we simply cannot make the shift from hospital to community without our community pharmacies. I am not the only one to see that—I am sure that all of us have made use of community pharmacies in our constituencies, and that colleagues will know the importance of the accessibility of pharmacies in towns and villages across the country. There are over 10,000 pharmacies in England. They are busy dispensing medicines, offering advice, and delivering care and services to support our communities. Patients across the country can also choose to access over 400 distance-selling pharmacies, which deliver medicines to patients’ homes free of charge, playing a vital role in reaching the most isolated members of our society. However, I acknowledge that access is not the same in all areas of the country. Rural areas often have fewer community pharmacies, so people have to travel further to access a pharmacy as well as other services.
Colleagues have also been right to raise concerns about pharmacy closures in the past. Local authority health and wellbeing boards are responsible for assessing whether local needs are adequately met by the existing providers, and what improvements are needed to ensure that people can access services. Those assessments inform integrated care boards’ commissioning decisions. In areas where there are fewer pharmacies, our pharmacy access scheme provides additional financial support to eligible pharmacies. The scheme helps pharmacies that are critical for patient access to stay open and provide local communities with continued access to medicines and excellent healthcare advice. In certain rural areas where there are no pharmacies, dispensing doctors can supply medicines to patients directly without the need for a pharmacy.
The hon. Member for Tiverton and Minehead will be aware that there are currently 14 pharmacies in her constituency. I am aware of the closure of two pharmacies in her constituency since 2017, and that the local population instead get their medicines from the neighbouring dispensing GP or from one of the over 400 distance-selling pharmacies available nationally. I also note that the latest data shows that there are 199 pharmacies in Devon, with 914 across the south-west. The Government are committed to supporting the critical role that they play in serving their communities.
Dr Luke Evans
The Minister points to the important partnership between community pharmacies and dispensing GPs. There are concerns about the change in the EMIS module and the future for dispensing practices. If the Minister does not have the answers here, will he write to me about what is happening with EMIS and where he is looking to take dispensing practices in the future?
Stephen Kinnock
I absolutely commit to writing to the hon. Gentleman with more detail. He raises some important points, and I will get back to him.
The Government have always been clear that investment must come with modernisation, and our 10-year health plan and our three shifts set out a clear pathway to getting there. In her 2024 Budget, the Chancellor took important decisions that enabled us to give the sector a record 19% uplift across 2024-25 and 2025-26. It was the largest uplift of any sector across the NHS in that spending review period. I am proud that just a few days ago, we announced another significant uplift in funding for community pharmacies. That means a further £340 million uplift for the sector this financial year, to support the supply of medicines and delivery of vital services across our country. That will include supporting the introduction of pharmacist prescribing as part of NHS services in autumn 2026, to expand access to NHS care and strengthen support in communities across England, delivering upon the commitment made in our manifesto. That 10% uplift is almost three times the growth of the overall NHS budget, and it shows that when we talk about making the left shift, we are putting our money where our mouth is.
I will start with the shift from sickness to prevention, because community pharmacies will be vital in making sure that vaccine coverage reaches every part of our country. The NHS vaccination strategy in our 10-year health plan commits us to increasing vaccine uptake through primary care. One way that we are getting that done is through the national vaccinations programme. Alongside a core offer of vaccination in GP practices, we are making sure that vaccines are offered through sexual health services, maternity services, schools, health visitors and community pharmacies. Selected community pharmacies across the country have already been commissioned to provide MMR and RSV vaccines.
The expanded vaccination programmes make use of pharmacy teams’ expertise in delivering vaccines, releasing pressure on GPs and helping to protect the most vulnerable members of our society. We have also seen a significant increase in the provision of flu jabs within community pharmacies, with approximately 4.7 million people being vaccinated by pharmacists in the 2025-26 seasonal flu vaccination programme up to February 2026. That is up by around 600,000 vaccinations the previous year, showing the progress that has been made.
When we talk about prevention, we are not just talking about vaccines, because community pharmacies are also delivering the hypertension case-finding service, which spots people at risk and helps to prevent cardiovascular disease. Nearly 3.6 million free consultations were delivered in the 12 months to February this year. That is a great example of the sickness to prevention shift in action.
Turning to our shift from analogue to digital, so many pharmacists and pharmacy technicians are not working with technology that is equal to their skill, talent or ambition. I am afraid to say that it is a similar story across other parts of the NHS, where the outdated technology is holding staff back from realising their full potential. We are supporting pharmacies through digital transformation. Last year, a new Amazon-style prescription tracker went live on the NHS app across nearly 1,500 community pharmacies in England, enabling patients to check on their prescriptions through real-time updates.
This year, we want to make digital access even easier, with stronger links between pharmacies and general practice as we build stronger neighbourhood health teams across every community. That will make them match-ready for the introduction of pharmacy prescribing as part of NHS services from this autumn. Digital also has a huge role to play in our supply chains and improving the public’s access to the medication they need. That has included our secondary legislation to enable the expansion of hub-and-spoke dispensing between different pharmacies, to make it possible for more pharmacies to use automated dispensing, realise economies of scale and increase efficiency and productivity.
Additionally, GPs cannot currently see live national shortages when prescribing, but this year we will make it possible for GPs to be aware of these shortages in real time. That will mean that patients no longer have to go from pillar to post looking for medicines that are not available, because GPs will be able to prescribe an antibiotic unaffected by supply issues.
In the NHS that is fit for the future, pharmacies will play a key role in the shift from hospital to community. We have already begun making huge progress in rebuilding primary care and fixing the front door to the NHS by ending the 8 am scramble, whether through extra funding for general practice, hiring more GPs or the introduction of online services. We will go even further to ease the pressure on GPs by making sure that pharmacists are making the most of their clinical abilities.
That is why the Government have been promoting the Pharmacy First campaign, although I take on board some of the very interesting suggestions about the rebranding. I will have a think about that; I am not going to make any rash decisions today. The most recent data shows that the number of people polled who knew that their pharmacy would treat Pharmacy First conditions rose from 71% to 79%. Trust in the advice given by the pharmacy team increased from 61% to 70%, and intention to use the pharmacy if people had conditions covered by Pharmacy First went up from 32% to 37%.
Jim Shannon
I very much welcome what the Minister has said. There is lots of good stuff being rolled out across the United Kingdom, but I asked him to share some of the things that have been done with the Northern Ireland Assembly Minister, Mike Nesbitt. I know the Minister has regular contact with him, so perhaps he could say, “This is what we are doing here. Maybe you should do the same.”
Stephen Kinnock
We do indeed have an excellent relationship. If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will go back into some of the discussions that we have been having and write to him with an update on the latest thinking.
A second public advertising campaign ran from October 2025 to this January, and I look forward to updating the House when data about its impact becomes available. Another thing to watch is the independent prescribing pathfinder programme, through which 200 sites have delivered 34,000 consultations. About 60% resulted in a prescribing decision, and 90% of those prescriptions were completed without the need to refer to a GP. When it comes to relieving pressure on other parts of the system, the pathfinder programme shows immense promise.
As announced last week, the new community pharmacy contractual framework for 2026-27 will focus on implementing what we have learned from the pathfinder programme as we roll out NHS pharmacists prescribing nationally from autumn this year. That will deliver the 10-year plan’s ambition for pharmacies to go beyond dispensing and to offer more clinical services as part of an integrated neighbourhood health team.
We have also introduced legislation to enable pharmacy technicians to manage dispensing processes that would otherwise be undertaken by pharmacists, and to allow checked and bagged medicines to be handed out in the absence of the pharmacist. That saves time for patients, who will not have to queue for as long to get their medicine. It is good for busy pharmacists, who will have more time for clinical services, and for pharmacy technicians, who will be able to use their skillset as qualified professionals.
Pharmacies are a massive untapped resource. The NHS that we are building puts them front and centre of care in every community, whether on the local high street or as one of the more than 400 distance-selling pharmacies that can reach across the country, including rural areas. This year, I plan to spend a lot more time with our partners in the sector to seize every opportunity to go further, and I am always keen to work with colleagues across the House on this.
As the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) said, there is a clear commitment to long-term reform. Some of the issues that are holding the sector back require fundamental thinking. We are in discussions, and I am looking forward to a meeting very soon with Community Pharmacy England. I want to put on the record my thanks to it and, in particular, to Janet Morrison, for the incredibly constructive way in which it has engaged with me and my team on the contract negotiations and the strategic thinking that needs to go into long-term reform. Our latest deal with the sector shows that this Government are in it for the long haul and are fully committed to putting pharmacies right at the heart of getting our NHS back on its feet and fit for the future.