Community Pharmacies

Debate between Rachel Gilmour and Manuela Perteghella

Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Rachel Gilmour]

I agree wholeheartedly.

I want to turn to two issues that I consider to be the systemic failures underlying all others: workforce and integration. On workforce, the community pharmacy network lost 3,000 full-time equivalent pharmacists between 2021 and 2025. That is not a sustainable trajectory. There is a specific incoherence in current policy that I must name. If one arm of the national health service is funded to recruit pharmacists away from community pharmacy while community pharmacies are simultaneously expected to take pressure off the same system, that is not joined-up workforce planning; it is quite simply the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

The introduction of independent prescribing is laudable and long overdue, and I note that it is expected to come later this year, but I ask for more specificity from the Minister. What is the Government’s current timetable for making independent prescribing a routine, commissioned part of NHS community pharmacy services? If we train pharmacists to prescribe and then fail to commission services that let them do so in community settings, we will have wasted a major opportunity, and we will have trained a cohort of professionals whose skills are systematically underused.

On integration, Pharmacy First will not reach its full potential if GPs, hospitals, NHS 111 and patients all have a different understanding of how it functions. The incongruence within the system is hobbling pharmacy practice. What is required is proper system-wide integration, with pharmacies recognised as a fundamental pillar of our NHS. As the NHS modernisation Bill progresses through Parliament, that must be recognised. 

Pharmacies are already doing the work that the Government say they want the NHS to do. They are the first port of call, the most accessible point of contact and the trusted face of healthcare on high streets and in rural communities across this country. The Government have taken some positive steps, and I reiterate that the 10.3% uplift is very important. The direction of travel towards community care, independent prescribing and neighbourhood health is right, but direction without sufficient resource is just aspiration.

[Manuela Perteghella (Stratford-on-Avon) (LD)]

Although I also welcome the funding uplift, community pharmacies were already in crisis after years of real-term funding cuts, especially in rural areas. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to scrap unfair budgetary pressures on community pharmacies and commit to a funding model that will put them on a sustainable financial footing for years to come?

[Rachel Gilmour]

Of course, I fully agree with my hon. Friend’s comments, and I laud her good work in her constituency. I urge the Government to commit to above-inflation funding increases year on year in order to close the £2 billion gap identified by their own independent analysis, deliver proper integration across the NHS and address the workforce crisis before it becomes irreversible. Pharmacies are ready, they are willing and they are already delivering. The question is whether the Government will match that commitment with the funding and the strategy that the sector and our constituents deserve. I look forward to hearing hon. Members’ contributions.