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The Health and Social Care Committee has today published the Government’s response to the predecessor committee’s report on Pharmacy and has written back to the Minister of State for Care, Stephen Kinnock, to follow up on particular issues raised in the report and response.

• The Government’s response to the predecessor committee’s report on Pharmacy
• Correspondence to Minister Kinnock relating to the Government response to the Committee's Pharmacy Report
• Read the full report on Pharmacy published in May 2024 (HTML)
• Read the full report on Pharmacy published in May 2024 (PDF)
• Inquiry: Pharmacy
• Health and Social Care Committee

In their report in May 2024, the predecessor Health and Social Care committee said the Government must urgently reform the funding framework for community pharmacy if more clinical services are to be delivered and increasing demands for medication are to be met. 

In its response, the Government says that NHS England are currently undertaking an economic analysis of the sector, which will inform future proposals for funding and contractual arrangements.  

The Government says it will take the committee’s recommendations on the complexity of current arrangements into consideration in developing any future proposals for consultation with Community Pharmacy England.  

The predecessor committee in May called on the Government to address medicine shortages, which they warned risked undermining initiatives such as Pharmacy First by eroding public confidence in pharmacists. 

In its response, the Government says that the Department of Health and Social Care ‘working closely with NHS England, is taking forward a range of actions to improve our ability to mitigate and manage shortages and strengthen our resilience.’  

Amongst its recommendations the committee also called for an integrated and funded workforce plan for pharmacy to be developed. The Government states that it will ‘this summer… publish a refreshed Long Term Workforce Plan’, and that it is ‘committed to growing the pharmacy workforce’.  

Throughout its response, the Government cites its 10 Year Health Plan, due to be published in the Spring of 2025, and says that the engagement on the 10 Year Health Plan ‘provides opportunity for gathering ideas and evidence to shape future clinical service models in community pharmacy’. 

In the letter the Committee has sent to the Department today, MPs ‘welcome... the fact that [the Government] are actively considering the role of pharmacies in the development of the 10 Year Health Plan’ and they ‘urge the Government to be bold and ambitious when setting out its vision for the role that community pharmacies could play’.  

The Committee’s letter follows up on four of the recommendations made in the Pharmacy report, on how pharmacies cope with shortages of medicines and on their ability to provide substitutions without the patient needing to revisit their GP. The letter also asks for clarity on their recommendation that NHS England should commission community pharmacies to provide all routine and seasonal immunisations for adults and children. 

Chair's comment

The Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, Layla Moran MP, recently said: 

“The predecessor committee made important recommendations calling on the Government to act at pace to address the pressing issues in community pharmacy on funding, medicine shortages and challenges in the workforce.  

“While we are pleased to hear the Government say that these recommendations will feed into the 10 Year Health Plan and the Long Term Workforce Plan, we are concerned that their response does not clearly reflect the sense of urgency on these matters which the predecessor committee derived from its inquiry. 

“We will be closely examining the 10 Year Health Plan when it is published in the spring and will watch to see the extent to which the committee’s recommendations will be implemented 

“In the here and now, there are immediate questions that we have about the Government’s response to the predecessor committee’s report which we are following up in our letter to the Department of Health and Social Care today.  

“In particular, we know that uptake of key childhood vaccinations is falling, so we are keen to know whether the Government sees more of a role for community pharmacy in addressing this challenge.” 

Further information

• About Parliament: Select committees
• Visiting Parliament: Watch committees