Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, with reference to the article Practice under pressure: how can the exodus of GPs be reversed published on 31 August by Dr Imelda McDermott and Dr Sharon Spooner, what steps they intend to take to make general practice deliverable by reducing the administrative and financial burden on GP partners.

The ‘Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care’, published by NHS England in May 2023, set out actions on how bureaucracy and workload can be cut by improving the interface between primary and secondary care, cutting unnecessary burdens on general practitioners through the Bureaucracy Busting Concordat, which was published in August 2022, and streamlining the Investment and Impact Fund from 36 to five indicators from 2023/24. Copies of both the delivery plan and the Concordat are attached.

Spending on general practice rose by nearly a fifth in real terms between 2017 and the most recent data in 2021. More specifically, spending grew from £11.3 billion in 2016/17 to £13.5 billion in 2021/22, representing a 19% increase in real terms.