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A letter sent to health secretary Wes Streeting on behalf of more than 3,000 community pharmacy owners in England has warned that services face being cut — or pharmacy businesses closed — without an increase to funding.
The letter, coordinated by the National Pharmacy Association (NPA) and sent on 18 February 2026, said that two-thirds of pharmacies “are at real risk of imminent closure” and “face the reality of underfunding in a real and very brutal way”.
The results of a survey conducted by the NPA found that at least 65% of pharmacies operated at a loss in 2025, with nearly half (45%) of pharmacy owners relying on personal savings or re-mortgaged homes to subside their pharmacy.
These closure threats are “blowing an enormous hole in the [NHS] ten-year plan before it has even begun”, the letter noted.
It said that deprived areas have been hit hardest with pharmacy closures — Liverpool recorded the highest closure rate per head between 2022 and 2025, followed by Blackpool, Coventry and Hull — adding that “this cannot go on”.
Commenting on the letter, Olivier Picard, chair of the NPA, said: “The fact that so many pharmacies operate at a loss should set off serious alarm bells in government about the stability of medicine supply on which millions of people depend.
“Without urgent action, millions of patients risk losing the most accessible part of the NHS. This is now a question of patient access and NHS resilience, not just pharmacy funding.”
Janet Morrison, chief executive of Community Pharmacy England, said: “We have been warning the government and NHS that community pharmacies are battling to survive in the current climate. The pressures are extreme.
“Without intervention, we will see only more deterioration of the pharmacy sector with significant impacts on the patients and communities that rely upon them.
“Government must urgently develop a roadmap for community pharmacy’s future and make immediate progress towards a sustainable funding model,” she added.
Malcolm Harrison, chief executive of the Company Chemists’ Association, said recent funding uplifts had offered “a little respite but was insufficient to offset the financial pressures built up from almost a decade of real-terms cuts”.
“If investment is not forthcoming, the government’s ambition to bring healthcare closer to communities will fail before it has even had a chance to succeed,” he said.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said the government was “working hard to turn around a decade of underfunding and neglect”, pointing to this year’s increase in community pharmacy funding to £3.1bn as “the largest uplift for any part of the NHS over the last two years”.
“Pharmacies are central to our shift towards community-based care, with services like free contraceptive consultations already reaching over 660,000 in the 12 months up to August 2025 — a 300% increase from the year before,” they added.
