Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the cost of (a) implementation for GP practices and (b) operation of the online appointment booking system introduced for GP practices in October 2025.

General practices (GPs) have been required to offer and promote an online consultation tool to their registered patients since 2021.

The change introduced in October 2025 regarding online access will mean explicitly requiring that all modes of contacting the practice are available at least during core hours, from 08:00 to 18:30. This means parity for walk-in, phone, and online access. This requirement builds on policies that have been in place for several years to encourage the shift to modern GPs. Practices that consistently use online access have reported improvements in services for both patients and staff, support timely access to care, and enhance productivity for patients.

The National Health Service provided extensive support to practices in the lead up to the introduction of these requirements and continues to do so. This includes reaching out to any practices that are struggling to help them to prepare, including providing guidance, webinars, case studies, and bringing in GP practitioners and practice staff who are experts in service redesign and improvement in GPs.

NHS England has provided a total of £71 million in funding for practices to procure high-quality online consultation, messaging, and appointment booking tools. An additional £88 million over 2023/24 and 2024/25 was provided for transition cover and transformation support for practices to implement these new systems.

We are also investing an additional £1.1 billion in GPs to reinforce the front door of the NHS, bringing total spend on the GP Contract to £13.4 billion in 2025/26, this is the biggest cash increase in over a decade.

The percentage of patients who said that it was easy to contact their GP increased from 61% in August 2024, to 74% in October 2025 according to the Office for National Statistics Health Insight Survey.