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The Government is in the “very final stages” of agreeing a new contractual settlement with the community pharmacy sector in England, health secretary Wes Streeting has said. 

In a House of Commons debate yesterday (March 13) to discuss the implications of Labour’s decision to abolish NHS England and end what Mr Streeting described as a “bloated and inefficient bureaucracy”, he was put on the spot to outline what the move could mean for primary care.

He replied: “I hope that we are beginning to turn what I think has been a deep anger, frustration and anxiety among primary care leaders about the state of the system as it is and a pessimism about its future into increasing amounts of quiet optimism and hope.”

By way of example, he said pharmacy minister Stephen Kinnock is “in the very final stages of work with pharmacists to stabilise the community pharmacy sector, which is vital for the NHS’s future as a neighbourhood service”.

Elsewhere in the debate, he said that having recently concluded contract negotiations with the general practice sector and offered it “the biggest funding uplift in a generation,” Labour is “about to conclude community pharmacy, too”.

The Government opened long-awaited contract discussions with Community Pharmacy England on January 28 to agree terms for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 financial years.

With the last contractual settlement having lapsed in April 2024, the intervening period of almost a year has seen financial pressures worsen in the sector and forced businesses to close, with mounting concern around the financial impact of rising minimum wage and national insurance costs set to come into effect on April 1.

In addition to his comments on primary care, Mr Streeting claimed that scrapping NHSE and shoring up decision-making powers in the Department of Health and Social Care would help “cut through the unnecessary red tape that ties leaders and frontline staff up in knots”.

Commending what he described as the “boldness” of the announcement, former Conservative health secretary Jeremy Hunt pressed Mr Streeting for more details, arguing: “If the result of today is to replace bureaucratic overcentralisation with political overcentralisation, it will fail.”

The health secretary replied: “In future, it will be for the Department and the NHS nationally to do the things that only the national health service can do, providing the enablers for the system as a whole.

“What we are presiding over and embarking on, however, is the biggest decentralisation of power in the history of our national health service.

“That will put more power into the hands of frontline leaders and clinicians, but even more fundamental and transformational, more power into the hands of patients.”