Community Pharmacies

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I thank the hon. Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) for securing this debate. She, the hon. Member for North Somerset (Sadik Al-Hassan) and all colleagues have dispensed some great ideas today. [Laughter.] Sorry, but it does not end there.

The Minister and Members may be aware—I might not have mentioned it enough—that I am one of the only practising optometrists to be a Member of Parliament, and optometrists share many of the concerns and challenges that our pharmacy colleagues face. I surpass the hon. Member for North Somerset in having been a community-based optometrist for nearly three decades.

I want to address many of the points that have been made. First, our GPs are facing real burnout. There is a lag in the number of GPs who are qualifying and taking up positions. In lower socioeconomic areas, of which there are many in my Leicester South constituency, there are 1,985 patients per GP. There are 300 more patients per GP in those areas and, as has been mentioned, pharmacists really do plug the gap, saving 38 million GP appointments and doing incredible work. The Government’s 10-year health plan is built on the bold premise of shifting care out of hospitals and into our communities. We all support that ambition—of course we do—but we cannot deliver care in the community if we are not allowing community infrastructure to thrive, and that is precisely what is happening to pharmacies at the moment.

Since 2017, England has lost more than 1,400 bricks-and-mortar pharmacies, which is a net loss of 15% of the entire network. In Leicester, five pharmacies have shut down in the last calendar year alone. There are now fewer than 10,000 pharmacies open in England, and nearly 64,000 opening hours a week have disappeared since 2022. Between 2021 and 2025, the sector lost 3,000 full-time equivalent pharmacists. Funding was cut in 2016 and held flat for eight years, and the sector has absorbed real-terms cuts of 30%. Pharmacies, unlike other businesses, cannot pass on their costs to their customers. They cannot manage demand by extending their waiting lists, and 90% to 95% of their income comes from the NHS. They are, in effect, trapped.

We all welcome the £340 million uplift announced for 2026-27 and the decision to begin integrating independent prescribing into Pharmacy First and the Pharmacy Contraception Service. Those are welcome steps, and everything of that nature is going in the right direction. However, NPA analysis shows that 8.9% is needed simply to allow pharmacy budgets to stand still—to absorb the national living wage, employers’ national insurance contributions, inflation and business rates. The settlement is just 1.3 percentage points above that threshold; it does not close the £2 billion funding gap that the NHS’s independent review identified a year ago. Much of the uplift will be swallowed by costs before a single patient sees any benefit.

I am not just here to outline the problems, as there are positives. Community pharmacies represent one of the greatest untapped opportunities in modern healthcare, and I say that as someone who has seen community-based clinical practice at work. Independent prescribing is, as the sector rightly calls it, a generational opportunity. Pharmacists already have the clinical skills. With the right framework and investment, they can manage long-term conditions, initiate and adjust medicines and take pressure directly off GPs—not as a stopgap, but as a genuine, permanent part of the primary care team.

Beyond prescribing, pharmacies are ideally placed to deliver integrated healthcare and lifestyle services, such as smoking cessation, weight management, hypertension case-finding and alcohol interventions. In my experience in community eye care, the closer we embed clinical services in high street settings, the better the uptake by patients who would never otherwise engage with the NHS. Pharmacies are trusted, accessible and visited regularly—far more than any GP surgery.

Medicine optimisation is another point. With an ageing population on complex polypharmacy regimes, pharmacists conducting structured medication reviews can reduce harm, cut millions of pounds in waste and improve outcomes. This is not aspirational; it is proven. We are simply failing to fund it at scale.

I have a repeat prescription for the Minister. First, publish a road map to close the pharmacy funding gap with above-inflation increases—not in one year, but as a sustained multi-year commitment. Pharmacies cannot plan, invest or recruit without it. Secondly, match investment in retained margins with real action on medicine pricing. The UK is an unattractive market for global suppliers, and medicine shortages flow directly from that. That is a patient safety issue. Thirdly, be genuinely ambitious on independent prescribing. The autumn roll-out into Pharmacy First is a start, but we need a shared vision of what full deployment looks like in this Parliament, with the funding to match. Finally, address the workforce crisis by setting out concrete steps to grow the pharmacy workforce in parallel with any expansion of services. New services on the backs of a depleted workforce will fail.

Health Bill

Shockat Adam Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 1st June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

We all cherish the NHS, and all of us in this Chamber have a duty to ensure that anybody who does not believe in the basic principle that care should follow need, not wealth, must be nowhere near the jewel in our crown that is the NHS. I begin with primary care—or, indeed, the glaring inequality in primary care. Practices in the most deprived areas carry, on average, 300 more patients per fully qualified GP than those in the least deprived. That gap has grown by 50% since 2018. In Leicester—my constituency and my home—there are 1,985 patients per GP, which is significantly above the national average. The Bill introduces a statutory duty to reduce health inequalities and, under clause 24, to produce neighbourhood health plans, but a plan without the workforce to deliver it is a plan in name only.

I must also declare my interest as a practising optometrist. Clause 14 gives integrated care boards new responsibilities over primary care services, and the Bill transfers commissioning of NHS sight tests from a national framework to individual ICBs. I completely understand the logic of localisation, but I have already seen what happens in practice. In Coventry and Warwickshire, a community urgent eye care service that was diverting more than 13,000 A&E attendances per year was withdrawn at the end of 2025. In Hampshire, community glaucoma schemes have been moved back into hospitals. This is the postcode lottery in action.

Glaucoma affects approximately 700,000 people in the UK, with about half of them walking around undiagnosed. It causes irreversible sight loss, it increases the risk of falls, and it carries serious long-term costs for both the NHS and social care, and we now have the technology to address it more efficiently than ever. The iStent inject device can be inserted during routine cataract surgery in a single procedure, treating both conditions simultaneously. This is exactly the kind of innovation that the 10-year health plan calls for, yet uptake is inconsistent because there is no national commissioning guidance. I urge the Government to ensure that the single patient record supports consistent clinical decision making across the glaucoma pathway, and that integrated care boards are required, not merely permitted, to commission those procedures.

The Bill also abolishes NHS England, and we have heard much about that. History gives us cause for concern, especially when it comes to private finance initiative arrangements, which have cost the NHS tens of billions of pounds over decades.

Let me end by saying something about the Palantir question. The creation of a single patient record is welcome, but the vessel matters as much as the vision. The £330 million NHS federated data platform contract, awarded by the last Government and inherited by this one, raises serious and unresolved questions, and it must be addressed.

NHS Federated Data Platform

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

Let me be clear: as a practising optometrist, there is nothing more wonderful than touching a button and a patient’s data going to the right people, and I am sure that the Minister will agree. The patient can then be treated appropriately and on time. However, the Darzi and Sudlow reviews, which were published last year, confirmed that our health data system is broken and fragmented, which costs patients dearly.

The public overwhelmingly supports better data sharing and so do I. In my opinion, the question is not whether we need data sharing, but who is responsible for this modern-day oil? As has already been said, Palantir was named after the seeing stones from the book “The Lord of the Rings”, the palantíri. Those stones possessed enormous power. However, I want to be fair about them. The stones themselves were not good or evil; they were powerful instruments of vision. In the right hands, they brought clarity and wisdom. The problem, as Tolkien understood it, is never the stone itself; it is who is holding it. Let us have a look at who is holding these stones.

As has already been mentioned, Alex Karp said this year that Palantir wants

“to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them.”

The co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, has written that he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible. He has said that the NHS is making people sick and that the British public’s love for the jewel in our crown—the national health service—is a form of Stockholm syndrome.

Those are the stated beliefs of the men at the top of a company that we have handed £330 million to, and a £1.5 billion strategic partnership with the British state. And Palantir’s ambitions do not stop there. Its chief operating officer has spoken of a future where Palantir software is inside every missile and every drone. In Gaza, Amnesty International has named Palantir as a contributor to the war crimes and genocide being committed there.

In fact, when a protester confronted Palantir’s CEO about the killing of Palestinians—100,000 and counting—in Gaza, he replied that the dead were “mostly terrorists, that’s true.” Over 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza and the CEO of the company that holds our NHS data calls them “mostly terrorists.”

It is not just the NHS that is affected. Palantir is the second largest AI supplier to the UK public sector by contract value. It has contracts with the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government, the Cabinet Office, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, local authorities and local police services, including those in Leicester South.

The Palantir contract review comes in early 2027, so the window is still open. I want to share a scan with a specialist and get an answer before my patient leaves the room; every clinician in this country wants that and every patient deserves it. But the seeing stone is only as safe as the hands that hold it. Choose those hands carefully.

Oral Answers to Questions

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Tuesday 14th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

For the final question, Shockat Adam.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

Over the weekend, it was my pleasure to attend the Beat the Odds event in my constituency, which amalgamated 36 grassroots mental health organisations that support people from all backgrounds and of all ages and help those who have sadly fallen through the cracks. The message from those organisations was overwhelmingly clear: they need more financial support. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure that grassroots organisations receive funding to deliver frontline services that save lives?

NHS Continuing Healthcare

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Ayoub Khan]

I totally agree about the need for parity of service across the United Kingdom. That must be not only the right thing, but the only thing to do.

A recent report from the Nuffield Trust describes CHC as an “all or nothing” affair for applicants that creates a cliff edge between carers getting full NHS funding and paying out of pocket to care for loved ones. But although chance certainly plays a role in determining who gets funding and who does not, there is also a sinister practice at play—one that violates the very principles of our health service and inflicts unnecessary hardship on families across the country. That is the ever more common practice of revoking funding, and making vulnerable people appeal and fight for the right to retain the funding they should have had all along. We see the same pattern emerging with benefit claimants and home-to-school transport for 16 to 18-year-olds with special educational needs and disabilities. In the vast majority of cases, after all the time and energy wasted by applicants and assessors, the decision is overturned.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

The hon. Member is making a powerful speech. Does he agree that, during these very difficult times, families want to give their loved ones who are not well all their attention, but these situations are usually so adversarial, involving lengthy legal processes that cost local authorities hundreds of thousands of pounds, only for the decision to be overturned and the family to win in the end?

[Ayoub Khan]

I absolutely agree. There is an unnecessary burden on families to start off with, and when the appeal process can take months and it is difficult for families to secure representation—they may end up representing themselves—that causes them further anxiety. I agree that there needs to be a review of the whole system, because it is a further bottleneck in an already very stressful situation for families. I will come to an example of a family I am trying to assist in that regard.

In many cases, decisions are overturned and the status quo is restored. We must be honest about what is driving this. It is the same culture of cuts and austerity, sweeping across this Government and the previous one, that is to blame for the crisis. Independent analysis shows that CHC spending decreased by 42% in 2024 compared with previous years, even as need continued to grow. That is not because people are suddenly less ill, but because access is being constrained.

Investigations have also revealed that private companies are being contracted to review CHC eligibility and, in some cases, to reduce care packages, raising serious ethical concerns about profit being tied to cuts in vital care provision. A system where decisions are not always driven by clinical need but by cost containment will inevitably fail to protect and care for some of our most vulnerable individuals.

My constituent Daniel has experienced the injustice of the CHC process at first hand. He suffers from severe learning difficulties, autism, anxiety and behaviour of distress, and is cared for by his elderly parents, Linda and Dave. In order to receive the proper care, Daniel is supported every day by six personal assistants, all of whom are being paid thanks to CHC funding. After an annual review in January last year, it was confirmed that his condition had not changed and therefore his funding ought to continue, and yet, since a spontaneous and unwarranted review of the decision, Daniel’s eligibility has been under excessive and unreasonable scrutiny. The reassessment directly contravened the national framework for CHC, which states that a full reassessment must be arranged only if there is

“clear evidence of a change in needs to such an extent that it may impact on the individual’s eligibility”.

The saga was concluded two weeks ago when, despite providing no clinical rationale for the “significant change” in Daniel’s medical needs, the care board revoked his funding, leaving his parents to foot the bill for his care. For more than a year, Linda and Dave have carried on their fight against the care board’s impropriety, which has understandably come at a great financial, emotional and personal toll, all while continuing to care for Daniel. Unfortunately, Daniel’s story is neither exceptional nor surprising. It shows how many of those reliant on Government support are being stripped of it in the blink of an eye.

The stories of Daniel and so many others show exactly what is wrong with the system. Since 2017, despite an ageing population and increasing complexity of need, the number of people eligible for CHC has fallen by more than 9%. Over the same period, the proportion of people found eligible after a full assessment has dropped dramatically, from around 31% to just 18.6%. That means that more people are being assessed, but fewer are receiving support.

For families, that often means a gruelling process, characterised by a mire of lengthy assessments, appeals, delays and uncertainty, at the most difficult time of their lives. Confusion, exhaustion and distress are mainstays of that process. Even for those who are fortunate enough to be granted CHC funding, it can be withdrawn upon review, leaving families in a state of permanent anxiety that they could be plunged back into crisis at any moment.

Behind every statistic is a family caring for a loved one with dementia, a neurological condition or even a severe disability—a family forced to give up work, drain their savings or even sell their home, all while navigating a system that is rigged against them from the start.

Meningitis Outbreak

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question. I can reassure him that, through partners in the NHS, we are ensuring that antibiotics are available to GPs to prevent students from necessarily having to return to Canterbury, especially if they have travelled a long distance to get home. There is obviously a widespread public awareness of the outbreak, so in all our NHS settings there will be a particular vigilance for these types of cases, which are rapidly reported. I am also reassured by the extent to which contact tracing with UKHSA is effective, and people are responding accordingly.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. I, too, would like to express my condolences to the families and loved ones of the two young people who have passed away, and send my best wishes to those who are in hospital. As the father of a daughter at university, I cannot imagine what they must be going through.

Many students have expressed to newspapers such as The Guardian their concerns about returning home where they have vulnerable loved ones, citing a mother coming back from hospital or those who live with their grandparents. Does the Health Secretary have any advice for students returning home to loved ones on not spreading the disease to them?

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for his question. It is worth bearing in mind that the transmission of this particular disease is through close and prolonged personal contact. Therefore, the risk of transmission is much lower than other outbreaks of disease we have seen in this country in recent years, in particular respiratory diseases and some of the concerns people had around flu over the winter. We are actively contact tracing and making antibiotics available. It is for individuals to make their own judgments about their own risk of exposure, and what that means in terms of close personal contact. More generally, if students returning home from university are sat next to someone on a train, for example, that is not close prolonged personal contact. I hope that reassures people that, through contact tracing, the availability of antibiotics and the standing up of the targeted vaccination campaign, we are actively managing the risk of transmission, and that the risk to the general public is very low.

Oral Answers to Questions

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Karin Smyth]

I am happy to discuss that issue with my hon. Friend. We are determined to have co-located UTCs; I know that that is a matter for the local commissioner, but I am happy to talk about it further.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

Vista is a 160-year-old charity serving people in Leicester and Leicestershire who are suffering from visual disabilities. Last year alone, it served 21,000 people, but sadly, it faces imminent closure if it cannot raise £2 million by the end of March. If that happens, the devastating effect on the national health service and the social care service will be unimaginable, so will the Minister meet me and other local MPs, as well as representatives of University Hospitals of Leicester, to discuss what we can do to save Vista?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question, and pay tribute to Vista for the outstanding work it is doing. Improving IT connectivity is a vital part of what we are doing, and the single point of access project is of relevance in that context. I would be more than happy if the hon. Gentleman wrote to me so that we can look at the issue he has raised.

Hughes Report: Second Anniversary

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

It is a real honour to serve under your chairship, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Sarah Green) for this valuable and vital debate.

I pay tribute to all families who have suffered a miscarriage of justice, and in this case to all those who have been impacted by sodium valproate or pelvic mesh. I am especially grateful to my constituent Emma Friedman, and I salute her and her son Andy for educating me about this issue, and particularly about sodium valproate, but also for their real strength and perseverance and their unwavering commitment to justice.

Achieving justice should not really be so hard, but unfortunately it is. As the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) mentioned, we have seen this all before: 30,000 people were infected and affected in the contaminated blood scandal in the ’70s and ’80s; 700 hard-working postmasters and postmistresses were falsely prosecuted and their lives destroyed; and billions and billions of pounds were wasted on unusable personal protective equipment during a national emergency.

Sodium valproate is an effective drug. It was developed in 1962, and it has transformed the lives of countless people with epilepsy and bipolar disorders. However, it has always been known to cause serious harm when taken during pregnancy, and the risks are stark: around 30% to 40% of children exposed in the womb develop neurodevelopmental disorders and approximately 10% suffer serious congenital malformations, including spina bifida, cleft lips and other lifelong disabilities. The sadness is that 20,000 children in the UK are estimated to have been affected.

The concern is that evidence suggests doctors were aware of the risks from the early years. However, according to the minutes of the Committee on Safety of Medicines, it made the extraordinary decision in the 1970s that fully warning women may cause “fruitless anxiety”. The warnings were not given, and the fact that that decision was made after the thalidomide scandal makes it all the more shocking.

Some parents report that they were warned about the possible side effects to themselves, but never about those to their unborn babies. That pattern appears to have been repeated again and again. Clear warnings did not emerge until the late 1990s and were only strengthened around 2010. The first GP toolkit was published as late as 2015—and it still did not mandate direct, informed conversations with patients, so GPs simply did not have to tell patients.

As has been mentioned already, women were often dismissed. No long-term study was ever conducted; even today, some women are only discovering through their own research why their 30 or 35-year-old child lives with a disability linked to valproate. That is truly shocking, and it is still ongoing—it is not history. The Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review chaired by Baroness Cumberlege published its First Do No Harm report in 2020. It concluded that women had been misled and ill-informed, and recommended an independent redress agency, specifically a compensation scheme for those harmed by sodium valproate and pelvic mesh. Unfortunately, the Government did not accept those recommendations. In December 2022 the Patient Safety Commissioner was asked to explore options, and on 7 February 2024 the Hughes report clearly called for an independent two-stage scheme providing both financial and non-financial compensation. The Government have yet to respond.

Meanwhile, families continue to struggle. In many cases it is the mother, who may herself still be suffering with epilepsy, who is the primary carer of a disabled child. Many families are living in difficult socioeconomic conditions and they are barely surviving. We cannot even begin to imagine the emotional toll and the feeling of guilt that many parents talk about. Many feel that it is their fault. We cannot imagine their mental anguish.

[Sorcha Eastwood (Lagan Valley) (Alliance)]

I pay tribute to the people who have brought this issue so far. Would the hon. Gentleman agree that the emotional toll he speaks of is living large in the lives of those families and that they deserve, at the absolute least, an apology and redress?

[Shockat Adam]

Yes—that is the least that we can do.

Sodium valproate is effective, as was powerfully demonstrated by the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis), and women must not abruptly stop taking the medication, as that can be seriously dangerous. However, this issue represents a serious failure of communication between regulators, GPs, specialists, fertility clinics and pharmacists. We must modernise the safety system, with better data sharing, digital alerts, clear warnings on packaging and, above all, mandatory one-to-one consultations so that every woman of child- bearing age understands the risks and the alternatives.

Mistakes will always occur in medicine, but how quickly we acknowledge them, learn from them and compensate those harmed is the true mark of a progressive society. The current Health Secretary, when in Opposition in February 2024, expressed frustration at how slowly justice was progressing. Those words must now be matched with action.

Oral Answers to Questions

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out this issue. As I have said, the reforms that we announced in December will make a major difference, because dentists have not been incentivised to do NHS dentistry. That requires us to significantly increase the UDA, as we are doing, but there is a range of other measures that we need to take. I would be happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the specific details of that case.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

Failed private finance initiative schemes from the noughties in three Leicester hospitals resulted in the NHS being sued for almost £30 million, despite no work being carried out. Leicester hospitals are still without any new buildings. I ask the Minister that expensive, inefficient financial packages—£60 billion of private money costing £306 billion of taxpayers’ money—not be utilised for future projects.

[Wes Streeting]

This Government are putting record levels of capital investment into the NHS to correct more than 14 years of Conservative failure. We are using public investment. We are certainly learning the lessons of the past in relation to PFI. We are able to do that only because people voted Labour and elected a Labour Government. I look forward to working with the city’s Labour MPs to deliver the improvements in services that it deserves.

Budget Resolutions

Shockat Adam Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I welcome the Government’s abolition of the two-child benefit cap, but it should not have taken 16 months—it should have been the first act of a Labour Government.

I will speak first about the national health service. It is the jewel in the UK crown, but under consecutive Governments, millions of pounds of public money has gone to waste on interest payments for PFI schemes—that is money that should have been spent on frontline care or paying for doctors and nurses. PFI was a costly failure that lined the pockets of private consultants and contractors at the expense of NHS patients and staff. Now, it appears that the Government are planning to do the same again but expect different results.

Failed PFI schemes from the noughties, for three Leicestershire hospitals, saw the NHS sued for almost £30 million by the favoured consortium despite work not being taken and not a single hospital being built. Leicester’s three hospitals are still without any new buildings, as Ministers have pushed their development into wave 2, way beyond the original 2030 target, more than 30 years after the need was first identified. Coventry hospital, which was built, costs £1 million a week alone. The law was even changed to ensure that private contractors were paid before our NHS staff. Since the inception of PFI, around £60 billion of private money has gone into 700 PFI projects. In return, the Government will pay £306 billion. Those escalating costs eat into the NHS budget and leave less for frontline services.

Secondly, I will speak about private providers. As an optometrist, I have referred people for cataracts surgery because the waiting time is much shorter and it makes sense to do so, but unfortunately the transfer of taxpayer money to the private sector reduces resources for NHS services and ultimately limits its ability to treat patients effectively. The Government have apparently set aside £2.5 billion—and that is set to rise to £16 billion—for private services That is disappointing, as they could have used the Budget to expand NHS capacity by building new facilities, rather than buying out private sector clinics, but they did not. They could support local authorities and not-for-profit organisations to take over social care, but they have not. These are political decisions that have consequences in the long run.

Thirdly, I would like to speak about the deal with Palantir on data sharing that the Health Secretary is pressing ahead with. I have had patients contact me who are really concerned about data sharing. In fact, two of them wrote to me in the last week because they are really frightened that they have to opt out of this. It seems that our data is a commodity that is going to the highest bidder.

I would also quickly like to touch on hospices. I am running out of time, but LOROS hospice in my constituency is serving 1.2 million people in Leicester with only 18 beds—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order.