Access to Primary Healthcare

Clive Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)]

As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), general practice is the front door of the NHS, yet communities in my constituency, such as in Arborfield Green, go without any local primary care provision. This is an area that is growing by thousands, and my constituents expect to have access to GPs who provide timely and appropriate care. The unfortunate truth is, however, that there simply are not enough GPs.

We know where the fault lies. The Conservative party’s underfunding and poor workforce planning have led to a service in crisis, jeopardising the standard of care that patients receive. GP numbers have fallen, and £350 million has been cut from general practices in real terms since 2019. Each GP in my local ICB are is now responsible for, on average, 534 more patients than in 2016, and nearly 80% of GPs say that their workload is impacting patient safety. It is clear that this is not a sustainable system, but, sadly, we never hear an apology from those on the Conservative Benches—of whom there are five at the moment.

I would be grateful for the Minister’s view on the call from the Royal College of General Practitioners for an explicit reference to primary care infrastructure in the national planning policy framework. This, it argues, would strengthen the ability of local planning authorities to hold developers to account on social infrastructure, such as GP surgeries. I hope that the Minister will ask his colleagues at the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government to consider the Royal College’s response, in order to ensure that places such as Arborfield do not lose out any longer, and to ensure that as Wokingham continues to build to Government guidelines, we have more GPs to cope with all the extra patients that the new building will bring.