Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that numbers of (a) GP surgeries and (b) staff working in those surgeries are not adversely impacted by changes to employer National Insurance contributions.

We have made the necessary decisions to fix the foundations of the public finances in the Autumn Budget. Resource spending for the Department will be £22.6 billion more in 2025/26 than in 2023/24, as part of the Spending Review settlement. The employers’ National Insurance rise was implemented in April 2025.

General practices (GPs) are valued independent contractors who provide over £13 billion worth of National Health Services. Every year we consult with the profession about what services GPs provide, and the money providers are entitled to in return under their contract, taking account of the cost of delivering services.

We are investing an additional £889 million in GPs to fix the front door of the NHS, bringing total spend on the GP Contract to £13.2 billion in 2025/26. This is the biggest increase in over a decade, and we are pleased that the General Practitioners Committee England is supportive of the contract changes.

As commissioners of primary care, integrated care boards are responsible for ensuring that there is suitable provision of GP services to meet the needs of their local population. Practices close for a variety of reasons, including mergers or retirement, and so closures do not necessarily indicate a reduction in the quality of care. When a practice does close, patients are informed of the closure and advised to register at another local practice of their choice within their area.

The Government committed to recruiting over 1,000 recently qualified GPs through an £82 million boost to the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) over 2024/25, as part of an initiative to address GP unemployment and secure the future pipeline of GPs. Data on the number of recently qualified GPs for which primary care networks are claiming reimbursement via the ARRS was published by NHS England on 7 April, showing that since 1 October 2024, 1,503 GPs were recruited through the scheme.