General Practitioners
(asked on 6th July 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to Pulse’s report entitled General Practice Workforce White Paper, published in January 2025, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of Pulse's conclusion that around a quarter of salaried GPs and locums are looking for a permanent role at the same time as practices are facing a shortfall in GP numbers; and what steps is his Department taking to (a) improve access to GPs and (b) increase the number of (i) FTE GPs in work and (ii) GPs on permanent contracts.
We are aware of reports of issues of general practitioner (GP) underemployment and unemployment in some areas, and the Department is taking several steps to tackle this issue and ensure that GPs can find fulfilling roles.
Across 2025/26 and 2026/27, an additional £1.7 billion has been invested in GPs via the practice and network contracts, 14% in cash terms and over 8% in real terms.
From 1 October 2024, the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) was updated to allow the recruitment of recently qualified GPs by primary care networks (PCNs) with additional ringfenced funding of £82 million. From 1 April 2025, funding for recruiting GPs via the scheme was no longer ringfenced, meaning that there would be no cap on the number that PCNs could recruit. Between 1 October 2024 and 31 May 2026, 3,879 individual GPs, as a headcount, have been employed and funded via the ARRS, with further information available at the following link:
As a result of these efforts, we currently have the highest number of full time equivalent (FTE) fully qualified GPs on record since 2015, 2,000 more than in July 2024. In keeping with this, FTE roles for GPs are increasingly being created and advertised, and a total of 710 advertised FTE roles were placed on the NHS Jobs service during Quarter four of 2025/26. This compares to 436 in Quarter four of 2024/25, an increase of 62.8%.
In the GP Contract this year we are going further. In NHS England’s letter regarding changes to the GP Contract of 24 February 2026, we announced the introduction of a new practice-level GP reimbursement scheme to enable practices to recruit new GPs or increase the number of sessions from GPs already working in the practice. The letter is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/changes-to-the-gp-contract-in-2026-27/
This scheme is funded by repurposing £292 million of funding previously allocated to the PCN level Capacity and Access Payment. From 1 April 2026, rules were also amended to permit any GP to be employed using ARRS funding providing that they had not previously been employed as a GP in core member practice of the PCN in the previous 12 months.