Sophie Willis / The Pharmaceutical Journal
Stephen Kinnock, Department of Health and Social Care minister with responsibility for community pharmacy and primary care, has said the community pharmacy contractual framework is in “crisis”.
Speaking at a Labour Party Annual Conference session on ‘Primary care on the high street’ in Liverpool, Merseyside, on 24 September 2024, Kinnock said: “Every aspect of my portfolio is in crisis or on the verge of crisis; it is completely broken, from 150,000 vacancies in the adult social care workforce, to GPs going on collective industrial action, to a crisis in the contract with pharmacy … a mental health crisis … seven pharmacies a week going bankrupt.
“I’m very sorry if people are getting annoyed about what they describe as ‘doom and gloom’ — I don’t see it that way at all. I see it as time for some honesty about the extent to which the last 14 years of Conservative administrations have broken our NHS and our social care system.”
The pharmacy minister added that “not enough” investment was going into primary and community care, “which of course exacerbates the problem”.
The five-year ‘Community pharmacy contractual framework’ expired earlier in 2024 and so far no new deal has been agreed.
In a statement published earlier in September 2024, Community Pharmacy England (CPE) said that it expected contract negotiations to resume “soon”, following a meeting between Kinnock and Janet Morrison, its chief executive, as well as two other members of its negotiating team.
In a written parliamentary answer, published on 16 September 2024, health minister Baroness Merron said the government was looking at contract negotiations with CPE “as a matter of urgency”.
A report on the state of the NHS in England — commissioned by health secretary Wes Streeting in July 2024 and overseen by Lord Darzi, who had previously conducted a review of the NHS in 2008 — concluded that with community pharmacies closing in “significant numbers”, there is “a very real risk that on current trajectory, community pharmacy will face similar access problems to general practice, with too few resources in the places where it is needed most”.
In response to the report, which was published on 12 September 2023, prime minister Kier Starmer said the government would engage in the “biggest reimagining of our NHS since its birth”.
