Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 28 February 2017 to Question 65408, on general practitioners: closures, for what reasons his Department does not collect centrally data on practice closures.

Although data on general practitioner (GP) practices is collected by NHS Business Services Authority and published for use in the National Health Service by NHS Digital, data on practice closures cannot distinguish between practices which have closed and those which have merged or been taken over. In addition, changes to definitions of GP practices for data purposes mean that it is not possible to produce meaningful figures relating to closures over a period of years.

The issues around this data collection do not affect NHS services in any way. NHS England works with the Care Quality Commission and clinical commissioning groups to assess local primary care provision in an area and to ensure that appropriate services are available.